Trump says he 'thinks' Ukraine is ready to 'give up' Crimea and tells Putin to 'stop shooting' after US president's meeting with Zelensky at Pope Francis funeral
Donald Trump said he believes that Volodymyr Zelensky is ready to give up Crimea in order to secure peace terms with Russia.
'Oh, I think so,' the U.S. president told reporters in New Jersey yesterday, asked whether he thought the his Ukrainian counterpart was ready to 'give up' the territory.
The comments came after the pair met on the sidelines of Pope Francis ' funeral on Saturday, their first face-to-face since the disastrous White House summit in February.
Trump said that during their talks at St. Peter's Basilica they had 'briefly' discussed the fate of the Black Sea peninsula.
He insisted that Putin should 'stop shooting' and sign an agreement to end the grinding war.
Zelensky hailed the recent summit as a 'good meeting...that has the potential to become historic', while the Washington said it was 'very productive'.
But the Ukrainian leader has otherwise remained steadfast on his position on Crimea.
Crimea has been a sticking point in negotiations. The strategic peninsula was given to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954 - before Putin illegally annexed it in 2014.
Experts warn Trump's peace plan, which includes recognising Russian authority over Crimea, would require constitutional changes and could amount to treason.
'It doesn't mean anything,' said Oleksandr Merezkho, a lawmaker with Zelenskyy's party. 'We will never recognize Crimea as part of Russia.'
Zelensky echoed the sentiment over the weekend, rejecting any suggestion his country would hand over the region to Moscow.
Speaking to reporters, he said: 'Our position is unchanged: only the Ukrainian people have the right to decide which territories are Ukrainian.
'The Constitution of Ukraine states that all temporarily occupied territories are temporarily occupied. They all belong to Ukraine, to the Ukrainian people,' he said.
'Ukraine will not legally recognize any temporarily occupied territories. I think this is an absolutely fair position.
'It is legal not only from the point of view of the Constitution of Ukraine, but also from the point of view of international law.'
As well as undermining Ukrainian sovereignty, potentially amounting to treason and stranding Ukrainian nationals, a concession would set an uneasy precedent for rogue states looking to illegally annex territory through force.
Kyiv has reiterated its desire to end the gruelling war in Ukraine, but warns it must have security guarantees to avoid Russia reopening the conflict at a later date.
Ahead of his February meeting with Trump at the White House, Zelensky said he had shared a list of 25 times Russia had violated ceasefires since the annexation of Crimea.
Firefighters work to extinguish a fire following an attack in Mykolaiv, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on April 17, 2025
Trump has, in recent months, taken a slightly harder line on Russia, after Vladimir Putin was accused of breaching agreed ceasefires and attacking civilian targets.
The U.S. leader said that Putin should 'stop shooting' and sign an agreement to end the grinding war that started with Moscow's February 2022 invasion.
'I want him to stop shooting, sit down, and sign a deal,' Trump said Sunday when asked what he wanted from Putin.
'We have the confines of a deal, I believe, and I want him to sign it.'
The White House has said that without rapid progress, it could walk away from its role as a broker. Trump indicated that he would give the process 'two weeks.'
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier on Sunday stressed the importance of the week ahead.
'We're close, but we're not close enough' to a deal to halt the fighting, Rubio told broadcaster NBC. 'I think this is going to be a very critical week.'
But there is still US frustration with both sides, as the war, which has devastated swathes of eastern Ukraine and killed tens of thousands of people, drags on.
Zelensky lays flowers at a makeshift memorial to honor the victims of a Russian missile strike in Svyatoshynskyi district on April 25
Russian Foreign Ministry Sergey Lavrov had said last week that Moscow was 'ready to reach a deal' with the mediating United States to end the war in Ukraine, while caveating that some elements of a proposed deal still need to be 'fine tuned'.
The Kremlin will be seeking to appease the US with a show of good faith after the Trump administration threatened to walk away from its intermediary role.
Trump was incensed by Russian attacks on Kyiv that killed at least 12 people last week - the deadliest such attack since last July.
'I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP!' he wrote on his Truth Social platform.
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