\n<\/p>\n
United States President Donald Trump has announced plans to convene a face-to-face summit between Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his latest bid to end Moscow\u2019s war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s proposal on Monday came as he hosted Zelenskyy and top European leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, at the White House for high-stakes talks on ending the conflict, which has raged since Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.<\/p>\n
Trump said he had \u201cbegun arrangements\u201d for the summit after speaking with Putin by phone, and that he would hold a trilateral meeting with his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts following their two-way meeting.<\/p>\n
\u201cAgain, this was a very good, early step for a War that has been going on for almost four years,\u201d Trump said on his Truth Social platform.<\/p>\n
\u201cVice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, are coordinating with Russia and Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte separately confirmed that Putin had agreed to the bilateral meeting, but did not specify a date or location.<\/p>\n
Zelenskyy, who described his meeting with Trump as a \u201cvery good conversation,\u201d told reporters that he was \u201cready\u201d to meet the Russian leader one-on-one.<\/p>\n
Moscow did not immediately confirm that it had agreed to a summit, but Russia\u2019s state-run TASS news agency cited presidential aide Yuri Ushakov as saying that Putin and Trump \u201cspoke in favour of continuing direct talks\u201d between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations.<\/p>\n
The proposals for a summit, which would be the first meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy since Moscow\u2019s invasion, came as the fraught issue of security guarantees for Ukraine took centre stage during the talks at the White House.<\/p>\n
The specifics of what those guarantees would look like remained unclear on Monday.<\/p>\n
Asked if the US could send peacekeepers to Ukraine, Trump said that European countries would be the \u201cfirst line of defence\u201d, but that Washington would provide \u201ca lot of help\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to help them out also, we\u2019re going to be involved,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n
Trump said on Truth Social later that discussions had focused on which security guarantees would be provided by European countries with \u201ccoordination\u201d by the US.<\/p>\n
Zelenskyy said that the guarantees would be \u201cunpacked\u201d by Kyiv\u2019s partners and formalised within the next week to 10 days.<\/p>\n
While Trump has ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine, his special envoy, Witkoff, said on Sunday that Putin was open to a security guarantee resembling the 32-member alliance\u2019s collective defence mandate.<\/p>\n
Under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, an armed attack against any one NATO member nation is considered an attack on all members of the alliance.<\/p>\n
Speaking on Fox News after Monday\u2019s talks, Rutte called Washington\u2019s commitment to be involved in guaranteeing Ukraine\u2019s security a \u201cbreakthrough\u201d, but said the exact nature of that involvement would be discussed over the coming days.<\/p>\n
Rutte said the discussions had not touched on the possibility of deploying US or European troops.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we all agree on is that if this war does come to end\u2026 it has to be definitive,\u201d Rutte said.<\/p>\n
Konstantin Sonin, a Russian exile and Putin critic who is a professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, said that meaningful security guarantees for Kyiv would need to include European troops on the ground.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is all \u2018unacceptable\u2019 to Putin, so for European leaders, it is the question how to persuade President Trump that without such guarantees, the war, even if it stops now, will start again in the near future,\u201d Sonin told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
Sonin said that Ukraine had been failed by \u201cwritten\u201d guarantees for decades, including during Moscow\u2019s 2014 invasion and occupation of Crimea.<\/p>\n
\u201cRussia has signed many international treaties recognising Ukraine\u2019s sovereignty and borders \u2013 including Putin himself signing one such treaty in 2004 \u2013 and still violated all of these treaties, both in 2014 and 2022,\u201d Sonin said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is all to say that the sticking point is not the language in some documents,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
The issue of what territory Kyiv might be asked to give up in a peace deal also remained unclear after the talks at the White House.<\/p>\n
Ahead of the meeting, Trump warned that the return to Ukraine of Russian-occupied Crimea would be off the table in any negotiated settlement.<\/p>\n
Trump has indicated that a deal to end the war would involve \u201csome swapping, changes in land\u201d between Russia and Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Russia controls about one-fifth of Ukraine, according to open-source estimates. Ukraine, which took control of a large swath of Russia\u2019s Kursk region during a surprise counteroffensive last year, is not believed to hold any Russian territory at present.<\/p>\n
Speaking on Fox News, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that both Moscow and Kyiv would have to make concessions for a deal.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously, land or where you draw those lines \u2013 where the war stops \u2013 is going to be part of that conversation,\u201d Rubio said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd it\u2019s not easy, and maybe it\u2019s not even fair, but it\u2019s what it takes in order to bring about an end to a war. And that\u2019s been true in every war.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zelenskyy, who has repeatedly ruled out handing over Ukrainian territory to Moscow, said on Monday that land would be an issue for him and Putin to work out between them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will leave the issue of territories between me and Putin,\u201d Zelenskyy told reporters.<\/p>\n
Yurii Poita, an analyst at the Kyiv-based Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, said the meeting could be cautiously described as a success for Ukraine, given its positive atmosphere and Trump\u2019s apparent desire to resolve the conflict on terms acceptable to Kyiv.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile \u2018security guarantees\u2019 previously demanded by Kyiv caused irritation in the US, we now see that the parties are beginning to work on the outlines of these security guarantees, and the broader security architecture that would ensure long-term peace and prevent a renewed Russian attack on Ukraine,\u201d Poita told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
Still, Poita said, the talks left \u201ccomplex issues\u201d outstanding.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the Russian leadership does not feel significant pressure \u2013 primarily economic and sanctions-related \u2013 Russia will ignore calls for peace or will set unacceptable conditions for Ukraine,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSecond, the specific elements of security guarantees for Ukraine: will they be provided, and will there be something akin to NATO\u2019s Article 5 for Ukraine from Western countries? Will Western military contingents be deployed in Ukraine to strengthen security?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
United States President Donald Trump has announced plans to convene a face-to-face summit between Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his latest bid to end Moscow\u2019s war in Ukraine. Trump\u2019s proposal on Monday came as he hosted Zelenskyy and top European leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and UK Prime Minister<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16559,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[150,2614,1092,9887,2722,2591,81,674,261],"class_list":{"0":"post-16558","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-proposes","10":"tag-push","11":"tag-putinzelenskyy","12":"tag-russiaukraine","13":"tag-summit","14":"tag-trump","15":"tag-ukraine","16":"tag-war"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}