Zelenskyj Warns of Decisions Without Ukraine at Alaska Meeting

When Russia's president Vladimir Putin travels to Alaska to discuss the war in Ukraine with Donald Trump next week, it will be his first US trip since 2015. Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyj warns, however, of decisions made without Ukrainian representation. Such decisions are stillborn, he says.

» Published: August 09 2025 at 08:30

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 for 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

According to Axios, representatives from the US, Ukraine, and Europe will meet this weekend in the UK to discuss the matter before the Alaska meeting.

Most recently, Trump and Putin met during a G20 meeting in Japan in 2019, but they have spoken on the phone several times since Trump was reinstalled as president in January. Putin has not met an American president on American soil since 2015 when he met Barack Obama during a meeting at the UN General Assembly.

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.