Putin said in exchange, he would be willing to freeze the current front lines in the rest of Ukraine — in the regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — and agree to a promise not to attack Ukraine or other European nations again.
But he didn’t back away from a demand to eliminate what Russia calls the “root causes” of the war in Ukraine — code for reducing the size of Kyiv’s military, abandoning its aspirations to join NATO and becoming a neutral state.
The details of Putin’s conditions emerged when Trump briefed European leaders on the talks as he was arriving back in Washington early this morning. Trump announced he believed an agreement could be reached quickly if Putin’s conditions were met, and that he would discuss the matter with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Monday, the officials noted.
European leaders also stated Trump voiced openness to providing US security guarantees for Ukraine once the war ends, though the specifics of what he’s willing to provide remained unclear.
Taken together, Trump’s recounting of the meeting provided little optimism among European officials, though leaders’ public responses to the summit were calibrated to avoid contradicting Trump.
Western European leaders have issued a statement backing Trump’s diplomatic push to end the Ukraine conflict – while also reaffirming their intention to further arm Kyiv and seek to bring it into NATO, the very issues Russia has cited as among the root causes of the conflict.
The leaders of France, Germany, Italy, the UK, Poland, Finland, as well as the presidents of the EU Council and European Commission, praised the peace efforts in a statement published on Saturday, but vowed to continue providing military aid to Ukraine.
“Our support to Ukraine will continue. We are determined to do more to keep Ukraine strong in order to achieve an end to the fighting,” they emphasized.
The statement dismisses any notion of a territorial compromise, stressing that it was “up to Ukraine to make decisions on its territory”.
The European leaders added that they were ready to provide Kyiv security guarantees via a so-called “coalition of the willing” – a France- and UK-led attempt to deploy a NATO “reassurance force” in Ukraine, an initiative that Moscow has staunchly opposed.
“No limitations should be placed on Ukraine’s armed forces or on its cooperation with third countries. Russia cannot have a veto against Ukraine’s pathway to EU and NATO,” the statement read.
