European leaders comment on teleconference with Trump on Ukraine
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (R) wait for the beginning of a virtual talk between European leaders with the US President on the Ukraine war ahead of the summit between the US and Russian leaders, in Berlin, Germany, on August 13, 2025. European leaders will hold online talks with US President Donald Trump, hoping to convince him to respect Ukraine's interests when he discusses the war with Putin in Alaska on Friday. JOHN MACDOUGALL/Pool via REUTERS
Donald Trump joined a teleconference with European leaders including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday, two days before the U.S. leader is due to hold a summit with Russia's Vladimir Putin on a possible peace deal for Ukraine.
Following are some quotes from the leaders following the call:
UKRAINE'S PRESIDENT VOLODYMYR ZELENSKIY
"Everything concerning Ukraine must be discussed only with Ukraine's participation. We must be preparing a trilateral format (along with Trump and Putin) for talks.
"A ceasefire must be the number one priority... There should be security guarantees. Truly reliable."
FRENCH PRESIDENT EMMANUEL MACRON
"President Trump was very clear that the United States wanted to achieve a ceasefire at this meeting in Alaska...
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"The second point on which things were very clear, as expressed by President Trump, is that territories belonging to Ukraine cannot be negotiated and will only be negotiated by the Ukrainian president."
"There are currently no serious territorial exchange schemes on the table."
GERMAN CHANCELLOR FRIEDRICH MERZ
"The principle that borders cannot be changed by force must continue to apply.
"Negotiations must include robust security guarantees for Kyiv. The Ukrainian armed forces must be able and remain able to effectively defend the sovereignty of their country. They must also be able to count on Western aid in the long term.
"Negotiations must be part of a common transatlantic strategy. Then they can ultimately be most likely to succeed. This strategy must continue to rely on strong support for Ukraine and necessary pressure against Russia. This also means, if there is no movement on the Russian side in Alaska, then the United States, we and Europeans should and must increase the pressure.
"President Trump knows this position, he shares it very extensively and therefore I can say: We have had a really exceptionally constructive and good conversation with each other." REUTERS
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By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, about two-thirds of residents of the Donbas considered Russian their first language, according to census data. Russian cultural identity and the language became even more dominant during the first decades after Ukrainian independence. About 90 per cent of Donbas voters cast ballots for Viktor F. Yanukovych, a pro-Russian candidate, in Ukraine's 2010 presidential election. The toppling of Mr Yanukovych, then president, by protesters in Kyiv four years later led Mr Putin to seize Crimea from Ukraine and engineer an insurgency in the Donbas. The insurgency created an anti-Russian backlash in the region. In Ukraine's last presidential election, in 2019, the Ukrainian-held part of Donbas voted overwhelmingly for Mr Zelensky, a Russian speaker who promised to bring peace without sacrificing Ukrainian sovereignty. Mr Putin, meanwhile, was turning to increasingly bellicose nationalism to try to rally domestic support after years of economic stagnation. His propaganda machine tried to rally Russians to the cause of the Donbas, a path that eventually led to a full-scale war. These propaganda efforts never achieved wide appeal in Russia. An independent poll conducted a few days before the invasion found that just a quarter of Russians supported bringing Donetsk and Luhansk into the Russian Federation. Will Putin stop at the Donbas? Mr Putin has periodically alluded to annexing other parts of Ukraine, leading Ukrainian officials and many Western politicians and analysts to argue that the war would continue after Russia takes the Donbas, whether by force or diplomacy. Their views are shared by Russian nationalists and many Russian soldiers, who have called on Mr Putin to carry on fighting for the rest of the land in the two other annexed regions, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Other pro-war commentators have said Russia would keep fighting until toppling the government of Mr Zelensky and installing a more pliant one. Many independent analysts, however, doubt whether Russia has the economic and military resources to press its offensive much farther beyond the Donbas. The Russian economy is stagnating, and its revenues are falling. This will make it difficult for the Kremlin to maintain the current pace of the fighting into the next year without significantly reducing the Russians' living standards. Mr Putin's authoritarian rule and weakening economic outlook may persuade him to settle for the Donbas, at least for now, according to some analysts. 'Russian society is in such a deplorable state that it would be willing to accept almost any outcome of the war,' said Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian politics expert at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. 'We can imagine various degrees of discontent from certain marginal segments of society – 'ultra-patriots' and the likes of them – but the Kremlin can manage it.' NYTIMES Additional reporting by Steven Erlanger from Berlin and Constant Méheut from Kyiv.
