Trump urged Ukraine’s Zelensky to make concessions to Russia in tense meeting: Sources
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During the meeting, Mr Donald Trump insisted Mr Volodymyr Zelensky surrender the entire eastern Donbas region to Russia.
PHOTO: EPA
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WASHINGTON - US President Donald Trump pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to give up swaths of territory to Russia during a tense meeting on Oct 17 that left the Ukrainian delegation disappointed, according to two people briefed on the discussion.
Mr Trump also declined to provide Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine’s use,
After his meeting with Mr Zelensky, Mr Trump publicly called for a ceasefire on the current frontlines, a position that the Ukrainian president then embraced in comments to reporters. A third person said Mr Trump came up with that proposal during the meeting after Mr Zelensky said he would not voluntarily cede any territory to Moscow.
“The meeting ended with (Trump’s) decision to make a ‘deal where we are, on the demarcation line’,” the third source said.
Mr Trump underscored that position in remarks to reporters on Oct 19.
“We think that what they should do is just stop at the lines where they are, the battle lines,” he said on Air Force One. “The rest is very tough to negotiate if you’re going to say, ‘you take this, we take that.’“
Asked if he had told Mr Zelensky that Ukraine must cede all of the Donbas region to Russia, Mr Trump said no. “Let it be cut the way it is. It’s cut up right now. I think 78 per cent of the land is already taken by Russia,” Mr Trump said in response to a question from a Reuters reporter.
“You leave it the way it is right now. They can... negotiate something later on down the line,” he said.
Overall, while not a disaster for the Ukrainians, the discussion was a clear disappointment for Mr Zelensky, who had hoped to convince Mr Trump to supply his government with long-range Tomahawk missiles capable of hitting deep inside Russia.
Mr Trump has not decided whether to make Tomahawks available, US Vice-President J.D. Vance said to a group of reporters on Oct 19.
The White House and the Ukrainian president’s office did not respond to a request for comment. Elements of the talks were first reported by The Financial Times on Oct 19.
In recent weeks, there had been indications Mr Trump was deprioritising efforts to force a deal on Kyiv and Moscow, in favour of throwing his full support behind the Ukrainians. After meeting with Mr Zelensky at the UN General Assembly in September, for instance, Mr Trump speculated that Ukraine could take back all of the territory it had lost to Russia, a possibility even Kyiv sees as remote.
But the Oct 17 meeting indicates that Mr Trump may once again be pushing for a deal as quickly as possible, even if it is on terms that are unpalatable for Kyiv.
US officials repeatedly brought up the possibility of a territorial swap between Ukraine and Russia – an idea that Mr Trump had embraced earlier in the year – and the US president said during the Oct 17 meeting that a quick agreement was essential, the sources said.
Swayed by Putin?
“It was pretty bad,” one of the sources said of the meeting. “The message was, ‘Your country will freeze, and your country will be destroyed’”, if Ukraine doesn’t make a deal with Russia.
A separate source denied that Mr Trump said Ukraine would be “destroyed”.
Both sources said, however, that Mr Trump resorted to profanity several times.
Two sources had the impression that Mr Trump was influenced by an Oct 16 call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. During that call, according to The Washington Post, Mr Putin proposed a territorial swap in which Ukraine would cede the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in return for small parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
One of the sources said that US officials proposed precisely that swap to Mr Zelensky on Oct 17.
Ukrainians see major strategic value in the portion of Donetsk and Luhansk that they still hold – they believe giving up that territory would make the rest of Ukraine much more vulnerable to Russian offensives, said one of the people briefed about the meeting. That source argued that giving up western Donetsk and Luhansk would amount to an act of “suicide”.
Two of the sources said US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff was among those who most aggressively urged the Ukrainians to agree to Russia’s swap proposal. Mr Witkoff mentioned that Donetsk and Luhansk have significant Russian-speaking populations, one of the sources said, a point he has made publicly before.
On Oct 16, before meeting Mr Zelensky, Mr Trump said he would soon meet Mr Putin in Budapest. A Kremlin aide said shortly after that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov would speak in the coming days to prepare for the summit.
In the Oct 17 meeting, US officials said Mr Rubio planned to meet with Mr Lavrov on Oct 23, one of the sources said. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A previous meeting between Mr Trump and Mr Putin in Alaska in August yielded no breakthroughs. REUTERS
