Trump to Engage Ukraine, Defy Putin – Negotiation Strategy

The president of the United States, Donald Trump, said Thursday that he will not be intimidated by the head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, at his Friday summit in Alaska, and promised to involve Ukraine in future peace negotiations.

Putin flies to Alaska on Friday on his first visit to a western country since he ordered the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which has unleashed a war that has charged tens of thousands of lives.

“I am the president, and he is not going to play with me,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

“I will know in the first two minutes, three minutes, four minutes or five minutes (…) if we are going to have a good meeting or a bad one,” he added.

“If it is a bad meeting, it will end very fast, and if it is a good meeting, we will end up achieving peace in the quite close future,” said Trump, who estimates that the summit has a “25%” likely to fail.

kyiv and his European allies fear that Trump and Putin will begin to redraw the Ukraine map on Friday without the approval of the Ukrainian president Volodimir Zelenski.

«The second meeting is going to be very, very important, because it will be a meeting where an agreement will be reached. And I don’t want to use the word ‘distribute things’. But, you know, to some extent, it is not a bad term “because we will talk about” borders and territories, “Trump told Fox News Radio.

On Thursday Putin praised the “efforts” of the United States “to end hostilities, resolve the crisis and reach agreements that satisfy all parties involved.”

“Hopefully something good leaves the meeting,” Zori Opanasevich, a Ukrainian resident in Anchorage whose family emigrated to the United States in the 1990s, told AFP.

– «Security guarantees» –

The head of American diplomacy, Marco Rubio, considers to address the “security guarantees” to end the most deadly war in Europe since World War II.

The Ukrainian president was not invited to what Kremlin described as a “face to face” encounter between Putin and Trump.

Zelenski was received on Thursday in London by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

European leaders try to influence Trump.

The conversation at the Elmendorf-Richardson Air Base will take place with interpreters, the Kremlin diplomatic advisor Yuri Ushakov reported.

“The agenda will focus mainly on the resolution of the Ukrainian crisis,” added Ushakov. He also mentioned “bilateral cooperation.”

The meeting must begin around 7:30 p.m., according to the Kremlin.

Next, the presidents will give a joint press conference, the first from one in 2018 in Helsinki during Trump’s first mandate (2017-2021), when both staged a good understanding between them.

– Military pressure –

In the field, the pressure increases on kyiv’s troops that face a rapid advance of the Russian army in the front of the Eastern region of Donetsk, where the Kremlin army claimed having conquered two more locations on Thursday.

Ukraine shot dozens of drones on Wednesday night that caused a fire in a refinery and wounded three people near the city of Volgograd, in southern Russia, according to local officials.

The official positions of the two parties in conflict remain irreconcilable.

Russia demands that Ukraine yield four partially occupied regions (Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporiyia and Jersón), in addition to Crimea, annexed in 2014, and to renounce the supply of Western weapons and their desire for adhesion to NATO.

For kyiv, these demands are unacceptable.

For three rounds of conversations, the last one in Istanbul in July, Russians and Ukrainians only managed to agree on the exchange of prisoners of war.

On Thursday, Russia announced to have exchanged 84 Ukrainian prisoners of war in exchange for the same number of Russians.

Bu-aue-sit / erl / db / mr / mr