Trump-Putin summit in Alaska will bring ‘dead solutions' if Ukraine is not involved in peace talks, Zelensky says
Earlier, the President had said he will meet 'very shortly' with Mr Putin to discuss the war in Ukraine and that he will announce the location soon.
'We're going to have a meeting with Russia, start off with Russia. And we'll announce a location. I think the location will be a very popular one,' Mr Trump said.
Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed the planned summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, warning that any peace deal excluding Kyiv would lead to 'dead solutions'.
In a statement posted to Telegram, Mr Zelensky said Ukraine's territorial integrity, enshrined in the constitution, must be non-negotiable and emphasised that lasting peace must include Ukraine's voice at the table.
Touching on Ukrainian anxieties that a direct meeting between Mr Putin and Mr Trump could marginalise Kyiv and European interests, Mr Zelensky said: 'Any solutions that are without Ukraine, are at the same time, solutions against peace.
'They will not bring anything. These are dead solutions, they will never work.'
Ukrainian officials previously said Kyiv would be amenable to a peace deal that would de facto recognise Ukraine's inability to regain lost territories militarily.
Mr Zelensky said Ukraine 'will not give Russia any awards for what it has done' and that 'Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier'.
Those comments came as Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield expressed little hope for a diplomatic solution to the war and Mr Trump's deadline arrived on Friday for the Kremlin to make peace.
Exasperated that Mr Putin did not heed his calls to stop bombing Ukrainian cities, Mr Trump almost two weeks ago moved up his 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.
Mr Trump's efforts to pressure Mr Putin into stopping the fighting have so far delivered no progress.
Russia's bigger army is slowly advancing deeper into Ukraine at great cost in troops and armour while it relentlessly bombards Ukrainian cities.
Russia and Ukraine are far apart on their terms for peace.
Ukrainian forces are locked in intense battles along the 620-mile front line that snakes from north-east to south-east Ukraine.
The Pokrovsk area of the eastern Donetsk region is taking the brunt of punishment as Russia seeks to break out into the neighbouring Dnipropetrovsk region.
Ukraine has significant manpower shortages.
Intense fighting is also taking place in Ukraine's northern Sumy border region, where Ukrainian forces are engaging Russian soldiers to prevent reinforcements being sent from there to Donetsk.
In the Pokrovsk area of Donetsk, a commander said he believes Moscow is not interested in peace.
'It is impossible to negotiate with them. The only option is to defeat them,' Buda, a commander of a drone unit in the Spartan Brigade, told The Associated Press.
He used only his call sign, in keeping with the rules of the Ukrainian military.
'I would like them to agree and for all this to stop, but Russia will not agree to that. It does not want to negotiate. So the only option is to defeat them,' he said.
In the southern Zaporizhzhia region, a howitzer commander using the call sign Warsaw, said troops are determined to thwart Russia's invasion.
'We are on our land, we have no way out,' he said. 'So we stand our ground, we have no choice.'
The Kremlin said that Mr Putin had a phone call with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, during which the Russian leader informed Mr Xi about the results of his meeting earlier this week with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff.
Kremlin officials said Mr Xi 'expressed support for the settlement of the Ukrainian crisis on a long-term basis.'
Mr Putin is due to visit China next month. China, along with North Korea and Iran, have provided military support for Russia's war effort, the US says.
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi said on X that he also had a call with Mr Putin to speak about the latest Ukraine developments.
Mr Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday to place an additional 25% tariff on India for its purchases of Russian oil, which the American president says is helping to finance Russia's war.
Mr Putin's calls followed his phone conversations with the leaders of South Africa, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Belarus, the Kremlin said.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Irish Sun
an hour ago
- The Irish Sun
Russia is running ‘slave catalogue' of Ukrainian ‘orphans' with kidnapped children ‘treated like animals'
RUSSIA is allegedly running a grotesque online "slave catalogue" of abducted Ukrainian children in occupied territory. The profiles can be searched by hair colour, eye colour and even "personality" in the latest twisted move by Mad Vlad Putin's regime. 9 Russia is reportedly running a twisted online 'slave catalogue' of abducted Ukrainian children Credit: Reuters 9 Children from an orphanage in the Donetsk region, eat a meal at a camp in Zolotaya Kosa, the settlement on the Sea of Azov, Rostov region, southwestern Russia Credit: AP 9 Ukrainian officials previously warned its children are being trained up to fight in Putin's army Credit: Bring Kids Back Ukraine According to the NGO Save Ukraine, it features almost 300 children labelled as "orphans" or "left without parental care". But campaigners insist many were forcibly taken from their families, re-registered under Russian documents and are now being "matched" with Russian families as if they were animals in a pet shop. Mykola Kuleba, head of Save Ukraine, described it as 'digital trafficking' and a 'slave catalogue'. He warned: "This is not adoption. This is not care. This is digital child trafficking, masked as bureaucracy. "These children are not 'war orphans'. They had names, families and Ukrainian citizenship." According to The Times, the depraved search tool reportedly allows users to filter children by age, gender, health and physical traits - even by whether they are "calm" or "active". The portal is run by Luhansk's so-called Ministry of Education and Science — part of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic (LPR), a Russian-installed regime in territory internationally recognised as Ukrainian. While some of the children listed were born after Russia seized the area in 2014, Kuleba says most were born before occupation and held Ukrainian citizenship. Kyiv says the catalogue is just the latest stage in Moscow's mass child-snatching campaign — a programme that Ukrainian officials claim has seen tens of thousands of minors abducted since Putin's full-scale invasion in 2022. Yale researchers, UN experts and legal bodies have said the deportations could amount to war crimes. Nazi lies, Vlad's propaganda & troops on border… chilling signs Putin ready to invade ANOTHER European nation after Ukraine In 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and his children's commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, over the illegal transfer and adoption of Ukrainian children. Russia has long defended these relocations as "humanitarian" - but Ukrainian officials and returned captives tell a far darker story. Survivors have described being beaten, starved, locked in basements, forced to sing the Russian national anthem, and banned from speaking Ukrainian in re-education camps. Some say they were told their parents had abandoned them. 9 Pictures show children inside Russian 're-education' camps in a bid to rid them of their Ukrainian heritage Credit: Bring Kids Back Ukraine 9 A chamber in Kherson where Ukrainian children were allegedly abused Credit: Security Service of Ukraine 9 Vitaliy was held at a camp in Yevpatroia and spoke of horrors he saw after begging to be released from an isolation cell Credit: BRING KIDS BACK UKRAINE 9 One 11-year-old, Illia, was forced to have shrapnel removed without anaesthetic after he was snatched by Russian soldiers Credit: BRING KIDS BACK UKRAINE Earlier this year, Moscow announced plans to send 60,000 kidnapped Ukrainian children to remote summer camps in the wilderness - a move critics see as deepening indoctrination. Ukraine's presidential adviser Daria Zarivna has accused Putin of 'weaponising' these children, warning they are being groomed to fight for Russia in future wars. She told The Sun: 'It's a threat to global security, to Ukraine's security.' Lvova-Belova - dubbed "Putin's childcatcher" and sanctioned by Britain for her role in the abductions - has openly bragged about "adopting" a boy from Mariupol. 'I was snatched by Russian soldier' ILLIA, 11, was deported from Mariupol after a Russian missile strike killed his mother and left him with horror shrapnel wounds when he was nine. His neighbours buried his mum's body in their back garden before he was snatched by Vlad's soldiers and taken for surgery at a camp in Donestk. The shrapnel was removed without any anaesthetic and he was forced to write and speak Russian and repeat "Glory to Ukraine as part of Russia". He says Russian forces tried to turn him into a "propaganda tool" but that he is not "one to be duped so easily." Illia's grandmother had been searching for her grandson ever since losing contact with her daughter in March 2022. It wasn't until they spotted the young boy in a video from Russia that she realised he was alone and that her daughter had been killed. His grandmother never gave up hope and set about getting her injured grandson back home where he belonged. Months later, Illia returned home to Ukraine and had further surgery to remove more fragments from his leg, while 11 remain. His grandmother Olena said: "He had a school, he had a home, he had a mother and he lost all of that - his entire childhood. "He kept to himself, he was afraid of noise, he was afraid of sirens. He had no memory. He now has dreams of becoming a doctor so that he can help fighters on the frontline as a combat medic. She is accused of overseeing the heartless bureaucratic machinery that strips Ukrainian children of their identities before placing them in Russian homes. Kyiv's Bring Kids Back Ukraine initiative has so far rescued nearly 700 minors, but thousands remain missing. Officials say no peace deal will be struck with Moscow until every abducted child is returned. 'This is genocide,' said Ukraine's Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets. 'These children are not commodities. They are victims of a brutal campaign to erase our nation's future.' 9 Putin meets with Russia's Children's Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova Credit: AFP
Business Post
4 hours ago
- Business Post
Ukraine will not cede territory to end Russian war, says Zelenskyy
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv won't cede territory to bring an end to war but is ready to work with US President Donald Trump ...
RTÉ News
7 hours ago
- RTÉ News
US-Russia summits: the highs and lows
With US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin set to meet next Friday in Alaska against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, here's a look back at previous historic encounters between the two nuclear powers: 1959: Eisenhower and Khrushchev Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev met at Camp David in September 1959 in what was the first visit by a Soviet leader to the United States. In Hollywood, Khrushchev delivered one of his legendary rants to an audience that included Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. The summit concluded with a statement that the two superpowers work towards talks on disarmament and on the status of Berlin, which the Cold War had divided. 1961: Kennedy and Khrushchev President John F Kennedy met with Khrushchev in June 1961 at the former imperial Schoenbrunn Palace in Vienna. The summit was an icy encounter befitting the Cold War era, made chillier by the failed US Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that happened shortly before. Berlin was top of the agenda, but two months later, the wall dividing the city would be built. A year later, the Cuban missiles crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. 1972: Nixon and Brezhnev The Vietnam War cast a long shadow over the Moscow summit in May 1972 between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev. But the summit would prove key in ushering in the period of detente between the two superpowers as they signed the SALT and ABM weapons-control treaties. In a joint declaration, they said peaceful coexistence was the only basis for mutual relations in a nuclear age. The two men met twice more while they were in power, underlining the thaw in ties. But relations would later chill again with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. 1986: Reagan and Gorbachev In four years, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had four summits. Their first encounter took place in Geneva in November 1985 where Reagan, still berating the "evil empire", suggested he and Gorbachev go for a walk "to get some fresh air" by Lake Geneva. When they returned, the talk was of "chemistry". Reagan found Gorbachev "very comfortable, very easy to be with". At the third of four summits in December 1987, both powers agreed a treaty to eliminate their short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles. 1992: Bush and Yeltsin Boris Yeltsin was welcomed as "a friend" by his American host George HW Bush in February 1992 during his first visit to the United States since the Soviet Union's collapse. The two were at pains to forge a close personal relationship as a basis for economic cooperation between their countries but also to continue reducing their nuclear arsenals. The summit marked Yeltsin's entrance onto the world stage and the first UN Security Council meeting devoted to the post-Cold War period. 1995: Clinton and Yeltsin Bill Clinton and Yeltsin held eight summits during their terms of office, which overlapped during most of the 1990s. Their summits included one in Hyde Park, New York in October 1995 where at times the two men, who had many disagreements over the years, seemed to get on like old friends. The summit brought no breakthrough agreements but a remark by Yeltsin at a news conference lightened the mood, and caused Clinton to burst into uncontrollable spasms of laughter. 2018: Trump and Putin Donald Trump sparked outrage across the political divide in Washington at his inaugural summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on 16 July, 2018 when he backed Russian denials of meddling in the election that brought him to power. The pair championed a fresh start in relations, coming out of their meeting expressing a desire to talk again on global challenges, after discussing an array of issues from Syria, Ukraine and China to trade tariffs and the size of their nuclear arsenals. 2021: Biden and Putin Joe Biden and Putin, who engaged in a war of words since shortly after the US president took office in January 2021, tellingly did not hold a joint press conference after three-and-a-half hours of talks in Geneva on 16 June 2021. However, they agreed to return ambassadors to each other's capitals, which had been withdrawn over Biden's allegations that Russia tried to undermine his candidacy in the 2020 election. Putin said he sensed "no animosity" from the man who had previously called him "a killer" while Biden agreed the talks had been "constructive".
