KYIV/LONDON: European leaders and Ukraine are urging the US to take a firmer line before President Donald Trump’s planned meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on ending the war, fearing it could tilt the balance in Moscow’s favour.
European officials presented their own Ukraine peace proposals to the US on Saturday.
Trump announced on Friday that he would meet Putin in Alaska on August 15, saying the parties, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, were close to a deal that could resolve the three-and-a-half-year conflict.
Details of the potential deal have yet to be announced, but Trump said it would involve “some swapping of territories to the betterment of both”. It could require Ukraine to surrender significant parts of its territory – an outcome Kyiv and its European allies say would only encourage Russian aggression.
US Vice President JD Vance met Ukrainian and European allies on Saturday at Chevening House, a country mansion south-east of London, to discuss Trump’s push for peace.
A European official confirmed a counterproposal was put forward by European representatives at the meeting but declined to provide details.
The Wall Street Journal said European officials had presented a counter-proposal that included demands that a ceasefire must take place before any other steps are taken and that any territory exchange must be reciprocal, with firm security guarantees.
“You can’t start a process by ceding territory in the middle of fighting,” it quoted one European negotiator as saying.
A US official said “hours-long” meetings at Chevening “produced significant progress toward President Trump’s goal of bringing an end to the war in Ukraine, ahead of President Trump and President Putin’s upcoming meeting in Alaska.” The White House did not immediately respond when asked if the Europeans had presented their counterproposals to the US.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron spoke and pledged to find a “just and lasting peace” in Ukraine, a Downing Street spokesperson said.
“They discussed the latest developments in Ukraine, reiterating their unwavering support to President Zelenskiy and to securing a just and lasting peace for the Ukrainian people.”
“They welcomed President Trump’s efforts to stop the killing in Ukraine and end Russia’s war of aggression, and discussed how to further work closely with President Trump and President Zelenskiy over the coming days.”
It was not clear what, if anything, had been agreed at Chevening, but Zelenskiy called the meeting constructive. “All our arguments were heard,” he said in his evening address to Ukrainians.
“The path to peace for Ukraine should be determined together and only together with Ukraine, this is key principle,” he said.
He had earlier rejected any territorial concessions, saying “Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier.”
Macron also said Ukraine must play a role in any negotiations.
“Ukraine’s future cannot be decided without the Ukrainians, who have been fighting for their freedom and security for over three years now,” he wrote on X after what he said were calls with Zelenskiy, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Starmer.
“Europeans will also necessarily be part of the solution, as their own security is at stake.”
‘Clear steps needed’
Zelenskiy has made a flurry of calls with Ukraine’s allies since Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff’s visit to Moscow on Wednesday which Trump described as having achieved “great progress”.
“Clear steps are needed, as well as maximum coordination between us and our partners,” Zelenskiy said in a post on X earlier on Saturday.
Ukraine and the European Union have pushed back on proposals that they view as ceding too much to Putin, whose troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022, citing what Moscow called threats to Russia’s security from a Ukrainian pivot towards the West.
Kyiv and its Western allies say the invasion is an imperial-style land grab.
Moscow has previously claimed four Ukrainian regions – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – as well as the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which was annexed in 2014.
Russian forces do not fully control all the territory in the four regions and Russia has demanded that Ukraine pull out its troops from the parts of all four of them that they still control.
Ukraine says its troops still have a small foothold in Russia’s Kursk region a year after its troops crossed the border to try to gain leverage in any negotiations. Russia said it had expelled Ukrainian troops from Kursk in April.
Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre, described the current peace push as “the first more or less realistic attempt to stop the war”.
“At the same time, I remain extremely sceptical about the implementation of the agreements, even if a truce is reached for a while. And there is virtually no doubt that the new commitments could be devastating for Ukraine,” she said.
Fierce fighting is raging along the more than 1,000-km (620-mile) front line along eastern and southern Ukraine, where Russian forces hold around a fifth of the country’s territory.
Russian troops are slowly advancing in Ukraine’s east, but their summer offensive has so far failed to achieve a major breakthrough, Ukrainian military analysts say.
Ukrainians remain defiant.
“Not a single serviceman will agree to cede territory, to pull out troops from Ukrainian territories,” Olesia Petritska, 51, told Reuters as she gestured to hundreds of small Ukrainian flags in the Kyiv central square commemorating fallen soldiers.