MUNICH — President Donald Trump joined a video call Wednesday with European leaders and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who implored him not to capitulate to Russia’s demands during Friday’s high-profile summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
During a press conference at the Kennedy Center in downtown Washington, D.C., Trump described the call as a “very good conversation.”
Trump said that, after his meeting with Putin on Friday, he would call Zelenskyy as well as European leaders to update them on what was discussed. Trump said there’s a “very good chance” that he would have a second meeting with Putin if the first one is productive.
“If the first one goes okay, we’ll have a quick second one,” he said. “I would like to do it almost immediately, and we’ll have a quick second meeting between President Putin and President Zelenskyy and myself, if they’d like to have me there.”
Asked what would happen if Putin doesn’t agree to end the war after the meeting on Friday, Trump warned Russia would face “very severe consequences,” though he didn’t specify what the response could entail.
Despite Russia’s invasion impacting them most directly, European powers and Ukraine have not been invited to the Trump-Putin summit at Anchorage’s Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. There is growing alarm in Europe that the leaders from Washington and Moscow could emerge with an agreement disastrous for Ukraine and the continent’s vulnerability to future Russian attack.
In a week of frantic diplomacy, the virtual summit included Trump alongside the leaders of Ukraine, Germany, France, Britain, Finland, Italy, Poland, the European Union and NATO, according to the German government, which has organized the call.
Zelenskyy attended the meeting in person, having touched down by helicopter in Berlin where he was greeted by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. It is the latest of what Zelenskyy says have been more than 30 conversations with world leaders this week.
After the digital gaggle, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told a news conference in Berlin that the meeting had been “constructive.”
European leaders had “made it clear that Ukraine had to be at the table if there were any follow up meetings,” and that a ceasefire had to be implemented before those talks took please, he said.
Ukraine was “willing to discuss territorial questions,” with Russia but “illegal recognition of Russian occupied territory is not part of the discussion,” he added. “Borders might not be changed by violence.”
Zelenskyy accused Putin of “bluffing” about his desire to end the war, saying that his Russian counterpart did care about the sanctions that were “hurting” his county’s economy.
He added that he wanted a meeting with both Trump and Putin and no talks about Ukraine should exclude Kyiv. “Everything that concerns Ukraine should be discussed exclusively with Ukraine,” he said.
The White House is yet to comment, but ahead of the talks Trump described his European colleagues as “great people who want to see a deal done” in a Truth Social post.
Most European leaders fear that Russia will not stop at the 20% of Ukraine it currently occupies following its 2022 full-scale invasion, and instead may use this land grab from which to launch further attacks on Moscow’s former Soviet vassals. Putin has described the fall of the USSR as a historic tragedy, and believes the Baltic states, which are now members of the E.U. and NATO, should be brought back within his sphere of influence.
Wednesday’s calls are a show of European unity behind Ukraine and other Russian neighbors who fear its next move. E.U. leaders will hold separate telephone discussions before and after the call with Trump, the latter including Canada, indicating the level of coordination between them.
European powers say that there must be a ceasefire before peace talks can begin — something rejected by Russia — and that negotiations cannot happen without Ukraine. They argue Ukraine must have “security guarantees,” perhaps in the form of Western peacekeepers, so the Kremlin does not use the pause to regroup and attack again.
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