BRUSSELS (AP) — Ukraine and its backers in Europe insist that the United States and Russia cannot decide on land swaps behind their backs at a summit this week, but the Europeans concede that Moscow is unlikely to give up control of Ukrainian land it holds.
Ahead of the summit in Alaska on Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump suggested that a peace deal could include “some swapping of territories,” but the Europeans see no sign that Russia will offer anything to swap. Europeans and Ukrainians so far are not invited to the summit.
European Union foreign ministers are meeting on Monday following talks on Ukraine among U.S. and European security advisors over the weekend. They are wary that President Vladimir Putin will try to claim a political victory by portraying Ukraine as inflexible.
Concerns have mounted in Europe and Ukraine that Kyiv may be pressured into giving up land or accepting other curbs on its sovereignty. Ukraine and its European allies reject the notion that Putin should lay claim to any territory even before agreeing to a ceasefire.
“As we work towards a sustainable and just peace, international law is clear: All temporarily occupied territories belong to Ukraine,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on the eve of the ministerial meeting.
“A sustainable peace also means that aggression cannot be rewarded,” Kallas said.
On Sunday, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Germany cannot accept that territorial issues in Ukraine would be discussed or decided by Russia and the United States “over the heads” of Europeans or Ukrainians.
Still, it’s hard to ignore the reality on the ground.
Russia in 2022 illegally annexed the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in Ukraine’s east, and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south, even though it doesn’t fully control them. It also occupies the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized in 2014.
On the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line, Russia’s bigger army has made slow but costly progress with its summer offensive. The relentless pounding of urban areas has killed more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians, according to U.N. estimates.
“In the end, the issue of the fact that the Russians are controlling at this moment, factually, a part of Ukraine has to be on the table” in any peace talks after the Alaska summit, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said on CBS on Sunday.
Rutte said Ukraine’s Western backers “can never accept that in a legal sense,” but he suggested that they might tacitly acknowledge Russian control.
He compared it to the way that the U.S. hosted the diplomatic missions of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from 1940 to 1991, “acknowledging that the Soviet Union was controlling those territories, but never accepting (it) in a legal sense.”
Giving up claim to any territory, especially without a ceasefire agreement first, would be almost impossible for Zelenskyy to sell at home after thousands of troops have died defending their land.
Ultimately, Putin is seen as being not so much interested in land itself, but rather in a more “Russia-friendly” Ukraine with a malleable government that would be unlikely to try to join NATO, just as pro-Russian regions in Georgia stymied that country’s hopes of becoming a member.
Zelenskyy insists that a halt to fighting on the front line should be the starting point for negotiations, and the Europeans back him. They say that any future land swaps should be for Ukraine to decide and not be a precondition for a ceasefire.
Claims on land could also be part of negotiations on the kind of security guarantees that Ukraine might receive to ensure another war does not break out.
The Europeans believe Kyiv’s best defense is strong armed forces to deter Russia from striking again. They insist there should be no restrictions on the size of Ukraine’s army and the equipment, arms and ammunition it can possess or sell.
Beyond that, they say Ukraine should not be constrained in its choice of joining the EU or being forced to become a neutral country. The Trump administration has already taken Ukraine’s membership of NATO off the table for the foreseeable future.
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Associated Press writer Dasha Litvinova contributed.
