Zelensky thanks European allies for support ahead of Trump-Putin meeting
Mr Zelensky responded by thanking European allies and wrote on X on Sunday: 'The end of the war must be fair, and I am grateful to everyone who stands with Ukraine and our people.'
The end of the war must be fair, and I am grateful to everyone who stands with Ukraine and our people today for the sake of peace in Ukraine, which is defending the vital security interests of our European nations.
Ukraine values and fully supports the statement by President…
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) August 10, 2025
Saturday's statement by top European leaders emphasising that peace cannot be achieved without Kyiv's involvement came after the White House confirmed the US president was willing to grant Mr Putin the one-on-one meeting Russia has long pushed for, and suggestions from Mr Trump that a peace deal could include 'some swapping of territories'.
This raised fears Kyiv may be pressured into giving up land or accepting other curbs on its sovereignty.
A White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they are not allowed to speak publicly, told The Associated Press that Mr Trump remained open to a trilateral summit with both the Russian and Ukrainian leaders, but for now, he will have a bilateral meeting requested by Mr Putin.
Meanwhile, US Vice President JD Vance on Saturday met top European and Ukrainian officials at the UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy's weekend residence to discuss how to end the war.
Mr Trump had earlier said he would meet Mr Putin even if the Russian leader would not meet with Mr Zelensky.
The Trump-Putin meeting may prove pivotal in a war that began when Russia invaded its western neighbour and has led to tens of thousands of deaths, although there is no guarantee it will stop the fighting since Moscow and Kyiv remain far apart on their conditions for peace.
Saturday's statement, signed by the president of the European Union and leaders of the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Finland, stressed the need for a 'just and lasting peace' for Kyiv, including 'robust and credible' security guarantees.
'Ukraine has the freedom of choice over its own destiny. Meaningful negotiations can only take place in the context of a ceasefire or reduction of hostilities,' the statement said.
'The path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine. We remain committed to the principle that international borders must not be changed by force,' the Europeans added.
A month-long US-led push to achieve a truce in Ukraine has so far proved fruitless, with Kyiv agreeing in principle while the Kremlin has held out for terms more to its liking.
Mr Trump had also moved up an ultimatum to impose additional sanctions on Russia and introduce secondary tariffs targeting countries that buy Russian oil if the Kremlin did not move toward a settlement. The deadline was Friday. The White House did not answer questions on Saturday about possible sanctions.
The Kremlin earlier this week reiterated demands that Ukraine gives up territory, abandons its bid to join Nato, and accepts limits on its military, in exchange for a withdrawal of Russian troops from the rest of the country.
Mr Zelensky said on Saturday that Ukraine 'will not give Russia any awards for what it has done' and that 'Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier'.
Ukrainian officials previously told the AP privately that Kyiv would be amenable to a peace deal that would de facto recognise Ukraine's inability to regain lost territories militarily. But Mr Zelensky on Saturday insisted that formally ceding land was out of the question.
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Turkic slaves fought in the armies of the Abbasid caliphate (7th to 13th centuries), some of whom overthrew their Arab masters and founded local dynasties of their own. The Mamluks, a corps of Turkic slave soldiers, took over Egypt in the 13th century and ruled it until the beginning of the 19th. Between the 15th and the 17th centuries, the Ottomans regularly enslaved Greek children in their Balkan provinces, to be converted to Islam and assigned to the corps of Janissaries or the civil service. Some of these ethnic Greeks rose to the highest positions in the state. It is easy to understand when one reads Marozzi's book why the conservative societies of the Middle East proved to be so resistant to the abolition of slavery. Lord Ponsonby, for many years Queen Victoria's ambassador in Constantinople, reported that when he conveyed his government's objections to slavery to the sultan, he was 'heard with extreme astonishment, accompanied by a smile at the proposition for destroying an institution closely interwoven with the frame of society'. Slavery in the Americas was different and harsher. The slaves were not 'closely interwoven with the frame of society'. The plentiful supply of land and comparatively small number of European settlers made the Americas dependent on the forced labour of the indigenous populations and, increasingly, on imported slaves to cultivate labour-intensive crops such as cotton, tobacco and sugar. Although American slavery involved some incidental domestic service and concubinage, the destination of the great majority was the brutal, self-contained world of the plantations. David Eltis's Atlantic Cataclysm deals with the trade which supplied this world with slaves. The subject is a minefield for scholars, for much that has been written about it is vitiated by the tendentious selection of material to serve a modern political agenda. Eltis's book avoids this vice. It is a careful study of the economics of the Atlantic slave trade and its impact on all three continents involved. The words 'economic analysis' will probably cause most general readers to run a mile, but that would be a mistake. For this is a readable and important book. It makes systematic use for the first time of the enormous databases of information about slave voyages, slavers and slaves compiled over the past 40 years. Eltis is certainly not an apologist for slavery or the slave trade. But he debunks many of the influential myths which have grown up around the trade since the publication in 1944 of Eric Williams's polemical but influential Capitalism and Slavery. Williams argued that the profits of slavery supplied the capital for Britain's industrial revolution and made possible its subsequent prosperity, and that slavery was only abolished because it later became unprofitable. He despised Wilberforce and his allies, and denied that abolition was a moral movement. Even given the material available to him, these arguments were hard to sustain. Eltis's analysis of the plentiful data on English slave businesses convincingly demonstrates that slavery was in fact profitable right up to the end, but that the profits were a tiny proportion of Britain's trading wealth, far too small to account for her industrialisation. Abolition does seem to have been a moral, not an economic, movement, driven by the evangelical revival of the late 18th century. There is a corresponding theory about the African end of the trade, which is in a sense the obverse of the Williams argument. It holds that just as the slave trade boosted the economic development of Britain, it exploited the African kingdoms which supplied the slaves, leading to the 'underdevelopment' of Africa. The consequences are said to have held back the continent to this day. This is a more difficult proposition to prove or disprove, because so little can be reliably known about pre-colonial Africa. But it is implausible. The traffic was never large enough to significantly depopulate the African kingdoms. The evidence marshalled by Eltis suggests that the African middlemen who alone could supply the slaves knew their market power and dealt on equal terms with their European counterparts. There are many possible explanations for the under-development of Africa but a trade which ended a century and a half ago is unlikely to be one of them. Eltis has done an unusual thing. He has reset the agenda in his field. It will no doubt make him enemies in all the right places.
