Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump have met on a few occasions in the White House. Photo / Doug Mills, New York Times
Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump have met on a few occasions in the White House. Photo / Doug Mills, New York Times
Donald Trump has demanded that Ukraine submit to Vladimir Putin’s peace terms or face destruction, it has emerged.
The US president, who spoke with his Russian counterpart shortly before hosting Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week, warned in an angry meeting at the White House that Putin would “destroy” Ukraine unlessa peace deal was in place.
Shouting and swearing, Trump threw aside Ukrainian maps of the battlefield and pressured Zelenskyy to surrender the Donetsk region to Russia.
Putin is demanding the withdrawal of Ukraine’s army from the crucial eastern territory as a precondition for peace.
However, the surrender of Donetsk is a red line for Ukraine, which has long refused to cede the territory, which Russia has failed to capture despite fighting since 2014.
Kyiv still holds about a quarter of Donetsk province. The land makes up part of the so-called “fortress belt”, a string of heavily defended towns that blocks Russia from making rapid westward advances towards the capital.
Ukraine’s military has held off Russian attempts to gain control of the Donetsk. Photo / Finbarr O'Reilly, the New York Times
In the White House meeting, Trump echoed Putin’s talking points, despite them contradicting his own recent assessment that Moscow was a “paper tiger”, European officials briefed on the meeting told the Financial Times.
The US President told Zelenskyy he was losing the war and said: “If [Putin] wants, he will destroy you”.
Trump is keen to secure another peace deal following the success of his intervention in the war between Israel and Hamas.
In recent months, he has swung between Russian and Ukrainian positions, often cooling on sanctions or further military pressure on Moscow after phone calls with Putin.
At the White House, Zelenskyy held his ground and refused to cut a deal that would leave Ukraine badly exposed. But the Ukrainian President left in a bitter mood, dashed in his hopes that Trump would authorise deliveries of long-range Tomahawk missiles.
On Saturday, Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said the visit “had not gone as Zelenskyy hoped”.
On Sunday, Zelenskyy told NBC News that “I don’t know the dialogue between President [Trump] and Putin,” adding only that he believed Tomahawks could pressurise Moscow into serious peace negotiations.
Asked whether Trump needed to get tougher on Putin, following his decision to turn the screws on Israel and Hamas, Zelenskyy said: “Yes… because Putin is something similar but more strong than Hamas. It’s more bigger war and he is the second [largest] army in the world.”
He denied that Russia was winning the war and said that Putin was after more than just a further tranche of territory, in remarks that appeared to reflect his discussion with Trump.
‘This is not about territory for Putin’
Russia’s “army now [is] in a weak position”, he said, with 1.3 million Russian servicemen reportedly killed or wounded and just 1% of Ukrainian land captured since near the start of the war.
“And really I don’t understand why the leader of the country which has the biggest territory in the world needs some more kilometres – that’s why I think that this war is not about the land and not about territory for him. It’s about our sovereignty and about our independence.”
Trump is set to meet Putin in Budapest within the next fortnight in an attempt to make progress on a peace deal.
During their phone call, Putin told Trump he was willing to cede small parts of the southern Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions under Russia’s control in exchange for the rest of the Donbas. Moscow has struggled to control the territory and made almost no progress on the southern frontline since 2022.
A European diplomat told TheWashington Post that Ukraine would never accept such a deal. “It’s like selling them [Russia] their own leg in exchange for nothing,” they said.
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