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European leaders will join Volodymyr Zelenskyy to meet Donald Trump in Washington, seeking to shore up Zelenskyy’s position as the US president presses Ukraine to accept a quick peace deal to end Europe’s deadliest war in 80 years.
Trump is leaning on Zelenskyy to strike an agreement after he met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska and emerged more aligned with Moscow on seeking a peace deal instead of a ceasefire first. Trump and Zelenskyy will meet on Tuesday AEST.
“If peace is not going to be possible here and this is just going to continue on as a war, people will continue to die by the thousands … we may unfortunately wind up there, but we don’t want to wind up there,” US secretary of state Marco Rubio said in an interview with US broadcaster CBS.
Trump on Sunday promised “BIG PROGRESS ON RUSSIA” in a social media post without specifying what this might be.
Putin agreed to Ukraine security protections at summit, US envoy says
Sources briefed on Moscow’s thinking told Reuters news agency the US and Russian leaders have discussed proposals for Russia to relinquish small pockets of occupied Ukraine in exchange for Kyiv ceding a swathe of fortified land in the east and freezing the front lines elsewhere.
Top Trump officials hinted the fate of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region — which incorporates Donetsk and Luhansk and which is already mostly under Russian control — was on the line, while some sort of defensive pact was also on the table.
“We were able to win the following concession, that the United States could offer Article 5-like protection,” Trump envoy Steve Witkoff told CNN on Sunday, suggesting this would be in lieu of Ukraine seeking NATO membership. He said it was “the first time we had ever heard the Russians agree to that.”
Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty enshrines the principle of collective defence, the notion that an attack on a single member is considered an attack on them all.
That pledge may not be enough to sway leaders in Kyiv to sign over Donbas. Ukraine’s borders were already meant to have been guaranteed when Ukraine surrendered a Soviet-era nuclear arsenal in 1994, and it proved to be little deterrent when Russia absorbed Crimea in 2014 and then launched its full-scale invasion in 2022. The war has now dragged on for three-and-a-half years and killed or wounded more than 1 million people.
Witkoff told Fox News that Russia had also agreed to passing a law against taking any more of Ukraine by force.
“The Russians agreed on enshrining legislatively language that would prevent them from — or that they would attest to not attempting to take any more land from Ukraine after a peace deal, where they would attest to not violating any European borders,” he said.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer hosted a meeting of allies on Sunday to bolster Zelenskyy’s hand, hoping in particular to lock down robust security guarantees for Ukraine that would include a US role.
The Europeans are keen to help Zelenskyy avoid a repeat of his last Oval Office meeting in February. That went disastrously, with Trump and his vice president JD Vance giving the Ukrainian leader a public dressing-down, accusing him of being ungrateful and disrespectful.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will also travel to Washington, as will Finland’s President Alexander Stubb, whose access to Trump included rounds of golf in Florida earlier this year, and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who is an admirer of many of Trump’s policies.
