When Trump and Putin meet in Alaska on August 15, Zelenskyj is not expected to attend, despite repeated attempts to arrange a meeting. On Friday, Trump was asked if Putin, as a requirement before next week's meeting, must also meet with Zelenskyj and replied "no, he does not".
In a speech published on social media, the Ukrainian president describes the meeting as "very far from this war, which is raging on our soil, against our people, and which cannot be ended without us, without Ukraine".
Donbass and Crimea?
On Friday, Trump stated that an "exchange of territories" is likely to be part of a peace agreement. According to sources for Bloomberg, Putin demands that Ukraine hand over the Donbass region and the Crimean peninsula to Russia, as part of the agreement.
News site Axios reports that Putin, in a meeting with US envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow this week, said that Putin also wants to freeze the current positions in the regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
But President Zelenskyj repeats the Ukrainian position in his recorded speech on Saturday morning:
Ukrainians will not give away their country to the occupant, he says.
Meeting in the UK
UK Foreign Minister David Lammy and US Vice President JD Vance have called an extraordinary meeting in the UK on Saturday. National security advisers from Europe, Ukraine, and the US will attend to discuss the upcoming Alaska meeting, writes Sky News.
In the morning, Zelenskyj spoke on the phone with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Allies need to take clear actions, the Ukrainian president urges in a post on X.
The state of Alaska, which Russia sold to the US in 1867, is not far from the Russian mainland. The only thing that separates them is the Bering Strait, which at its narrowest point is 83 kilometers wide.
Fact: Previous meetings
TT
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have not met since the American's previous term. But then they spoke face to face on five occasions:
July 7, 2017: Summit for the G20 organization, Hamburg, Germany
November 10, 2017: Pacific summit within the Apec cooperation, Da Nang, Vietnam
July 16, 2018: Helsinki, Finland – the only separate summit so far, with only Trump and Putin
December 1, 2018: G20 summit, Buenos Aires, Argentina
June 28, 2019: G20 summit, Osaka, Japan
