Donald Trump’s special envoy has revealed that Vladimir Putin has agreed to security guarantees for Ukraine as part of potential peace deal with Russia.
Steve Witkoff said the United States will offer Ukraine NATO-style pact but without officially joining the military bloc.
The Russian president agreed to allow the US to provide Ukraine the "robust security guarantees that I would describe as game-changing," Witkoff told CNN.
But following a meeting with the European Commission’s Von der Leyen in Brussels on Sunday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky insisted that only he and Putin can discuss territorial concessions at “a trilateral meeting”.
The development comes after Sir Keir Starmer announced he will join European leaders for Zelensky’s crucial meeting with Trump on Monday in the hopes of ending the war in Ukraine.
The Prime Minister will be joined by von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron and NATO secretary Mark Rutte all confirmed that they will attend the talk in the White House.
Finnish President Alexander Stubb is also predicted to make the trip, alongside Italian premier Giorgia Meloni.
Fears are mounting that Ukraine will be forced to surrender its sovereign territory to Russia after Trump reportedly backed Putin’s demands to end the war between the two countries.
During his high-stakes meeting with the US president in Alaska on Friday, Putin is said to have offered to freeze the frontline in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
However, Moscow has urged Kyiv to withdrawn its troops from the Donbas in eastern Ukraine, which includes the mineral-rich Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
He also wants “protections” for the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine and that Russian be reinstated as an official language in the country.
On Saturday, Trump said Zelensky should strike a deal with Putin to end the fighting which has raged for more than three years.
He told Fox News: “Russia is a very big power, and they’re not. They’re great soldiers. They did have courage in fighting and you know they are fighting a big war machine.”
Trump later posted on his Truth Social platform that the strongest solution "is to go directly to a peace agreement" rather than a temporary ceasefire "which often times do not hold up".
Zelensky, who will travel to Washington on Monday for the first time since the infamous Oval Office spat, is understood to have told Trump in a phone call following the Anchorage summit that Putin is not trustworthy.
Russia currently controls around a fifth of Ukraine, and European leaders worry that a deal could cement those gains and embolden him to expand further into the continent.
Members of the “Coalition of the Willing” — led by Sir Keir, Macron and Merz — will meet on Sunday ahead of Trump’s meeting with Zelensky.
In a joint statement, the group said they were “ready to work with Trump and Zelensky towards a trilateral summit with European support” but “it will be up to Ukraine to make decisions on its territory. International borders must not be changed by force.”
Sir Keir, who spoke with Trump and Zelensky after the summit, said that the president’s efforts “have brought us closer than ever before” to peace.
But Oleksander Merezhko, chairman of Ukraine’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee, said he was in disbelief that Putin was able to repeat his insistence that the “root causes” of the war needed to be addressed.
“Now it turns out that Trump has aligned with Putin on that. It’s an extremely dangerous development,” he told The Sunday Times.
Kira Rudik, of the opposition Holos party, said: “Trump got to shake the dictator’s hand, Ukraine got nothing. This is your summary. When you repeatedly warn dictators of sanctions but never follow through, they just end up finding it amusing.”
Writing in The Mail on Sunday, Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, called the talks “about the most vomit-inducing episode in all the tawdry history of international diplomacy”.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, added: “Trump’s resolve to get a peace deal is vital. But the harsh reality is that Russia has no intention of ending this war anytime soon.”
Zelensky said after the Alaska summit: “The positions are clear. A real peace must be achieved, one that will be lasting, not just another pause between Russian invasions. Killings must stop as soon as possible, the fire must cease both on the battlefield and in the sky, as well as against our port infrastructure.”
While an agreement to end the deadliest conflict since the Second World War was not reached after a nearly three-hour meeting with Putin, Trump stressed that “great progress” had been made.
In a statement after his encounter with Trump, Putin claimed the pair had hammered out an “understanding” on Ukraine and warned Europe not to “torpedo the nascent progress”.
On the battlefront, Ukraine claimed its forces advanced by nearly two kilometres on Saturday, repelling Russian troops in the northeastern city of Sumy.
