Donald Trump has said any peace deal between Ukraine and Russia would involve territory swaps, as he named a date and location for talks with Vladimir Putin. The US president said: “But we’re gonna get some [territory] back. We’re gonna get some switched. There’ll be some swapping of territories, to the betterment of both.” He did not provide further details. Kyiv did not immediately comment on the talks or the possibility of territorial exchanges.
Trump said he planned to meet the Russian president next Friday in Alaska. He announced the location in a brief post on his Truth Social site. Russian state media agency Tass confirmed the date and location of the meeting, citing Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov. Putin said earlier he was not ready to meet Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy, after the proposal of a three-way meeting by US envoy Steve Witkoff. “I have nothing against it in general, it is possible, but certain conditions must be created for this,” Putin said of a meeting with Zelenskyy. “But unfortunately, we are still far from creating such conditions.”
Ushakov said another summit with the US president could be held in Moscow, and said an invite had already been extended. The White House has not commented yet on the remarks.
The US president’s remarks on Ukraine came after Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said a “freeze” in the conflict could be close, after speaking with Zelenskyy, who has communicated with Trump and European leaders in recent days. “There are certain signals, and we also have an intuition, that perhaps a freeze in the conflict – I don’t want to say the end, but a freeze in the conflict – is closer than it is further away,” Tusk said during a news conference.
Ukraine’s president said late on Friday that Kyiv was in “constant communication with the American side” as the deadline for a Russian ceasefire passed. Zelenskyy said “No orders to stop have been given to the Russian army” and that the day had seen more than 100 drone strikes on Ukraine, as well as frontline assaults and other airstrikes. He added that all Ukraine’s allies were “united in the understanding that there is a chance to achieve at least a ceasefire, and that everything depends on the right pressure on Russia”.
Viktoriia Roshchyna, the Ukrainian journalist who died in Russian captivity last year, has been buried in Kyiv, in a ceremony attended by relatives and colleagues who paid tribute to her singular professional courage and the importance of her work. Roshchyna was reporting on Russia’s systematic policy of extrajudicial detention and torture in occupied parts of Ukraine before falling victim to it herself. She died at the age of 27 last year in murky circumstances, after more than a year in Russian captivity. Her body was returned earlier this year with some of the internal organs missing.
