Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy defiantly declared Saturday that his countrymen “will not give their land to occupiers,” after President Donald Trump suggested that a peace deal would include some “swapping” of territories with Russia.
“The answer to Ukraine’s territorial question is already in the constitution of Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said in a message on Telegram early Saturday. “No one will and no one can deviate from it. Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier.”
His comments came after Trump announced on Truth Social that a long-awaited meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin had been scheduled for next Friday in Alaska.
Further details and logistics of the meeting are still unclear and remain very fluid, including whether Zelenskyy will be involved. Trump did not mention the Ukrainian president in the post announcing the meeting with Putin.
Later Friday, at the White House, Trump suggested that there have been talks about Russia and Ukraine potentially “swapping” territory as part of a ceasefire deal. “There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both and … we’ll be talking about that either later or tomorrow, or whatever.”
A White House official also said Friday that the Russians have provided a list of demands for a potential ceasefire for the war in Ukraine, and the U.S. is trying to get buy-in from Ukrainians and European allies.
But in his message Saturday, Zelenskyy said any decision taken without Ukraine were “decisions against peace,” adding, “They will not achieve anything.”
The White House had not commented on Zelenskyy’s message by early Saturday.
Russia’s demands have previously included Ukraine ceding all the land that Putin claims to have annexed and accepting permanent neutrality, with a ban on Ukraine ever joining NATO.
Putin claims four Ukrainian regions — Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — as well as the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which he annexed in 2014. Russian forces do not fully control all of the territory in each region.
It remains unclear whether Trump’s reference to “swapping” territories means formal cession of land or a withdrawal from areas currently under each side’s control.
Zelenskyy and Ukrainian officials have long said they would not concede any territory that Russia illegally annexed. Ukraine has also insisted that any agreement must include “security guarantees” from its allies so that Moscow is not able to launch future aggression.
Zelenskyy later spoke with Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron. Macron said on X that he had a long conversation with the Ukrainian president and with “several European leaders,” and reiterated his support for a ceasefire.
Vice President JD Vance, who is visiting the United Kingdom, on Saturday met with U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy and a group of leaders from Ukraine and other European nations.
In a post on X, Vance wrote that the conversation was “to discuss a route to peace in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine,” but included no further details on the ceasefire negotiations.
According to a senior U.S. official familiar with the negotiations, Ukrainian government officials discussed with the U.S. tenets of a potential counterproposal to the Russian’s proposal put forward earlier this week to end the war.
The meeting with Vance included Andriy Yermak, the chief of staff to Ukrainian President Zelensky, and Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, as well as Lammy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoys Steve Witkoff and Keith Kellogg participated virtually, according to the official.
The official called today’s meeting “productive” and noted that there were discussions over potential security guarantees sought by Ukraine as part of any possible peace deal. To note, the U.S. official denied that NATO membership was discussed as part of the counter initiative.
“They’re productive, because it keeps the dialogue going,” the senior official said, adding: “Everybody was candid for comments, which, I thought, are important.”
Zelensky last spoke with Trump by phone on Wednesday, August 6 — though Keith Kellogg, the White House special envoy to Ukraine, is set to fly to the country early this week for high-level meetings ahead of the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, the senior U.S. official said.
The meeting in Alaska will be Trump and Putin’s first encounter since the invasion of Ukraine, the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II, and comes after the relationship between the two leaders has wavered.
In Trump’s first term, the president called Putin a strong and smart leader and said he “got along great” with him.
But after promising to solve the conflict within 24 hours during his presidential campaign, Trump has since extended that deadline and has expressed his frustration at the Russian president’s seeming unwillingness to end the war.
Trump had threatened to impose new sanctions and tariffs starting Friday against Moscow and countries that buy its exports unless Putin agreed to end the conflict. It was unclear by Saturday morning whether those sanctions would take effect or be delayed or canceled.
Trump’s ultimatums have not prompted the Kremlin to move one inch in its war in Ukraine so far, other than to give the president a meeting.
Although Trump’s agreement to a meeting suggested a chance for progress, it was far from certain anything substantial would be achieved, Peter Watkins, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a London-based think tank, told NBC News on Saturday.
“The underlying issues have not changed,” he said. “For Russia, this isn’t just about territory. It’s about controlling Ukraine as a whole.” He also noted that Trump would likely want to leave the summit with something to show for it, but the outcome might be only “another step” in a protracted process rather than a decisive deal.
Promises of talks between Trump and Putin have done little to quiet the violence on the ground since their announcement.
The last time Alaska hosted a high-stakes diplomatic gathering was in March 2021, when senior officials from the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden met with top Chinese officials in Anchorage.
On the ground, the Kremlin’s larger army is slowly advancing deeper into Ukraine at a great cost in troops while it relentlessly bombards Ukrainian cities.
Overnight, Russian drone strikes hit a minibus in a suburb of Kherson, killing two and leaving six injured, the region’s prosecutor’s office said Saturday.
Ukraine’s Air Force Command said Saturday that Russia launched 47 drone strikes overnight in multiple Ukrainian regions, with 31 of them making landfall.