By Trevor Hunnicutt and Steve Holland
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday that both Ukraine and Russia would have to cede land to each other to end the war and that his talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin would be aimed at taking the temperature on a possible deal.
Trump told a White House press conference that his talks on Friday with Putin in Alaska would be a “feel-out meeting” to determine whether Putin was willing to make a deal. He said he could know within two minutes whether progress was possible.
“So I’m going in to speak to Vladimir Putin, and I’m going to be telling him, you’ve got to end this war. You’ve got to end it,” Trump told reporters.
Trump also said a future meeting could include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and could end up being a three-way session including himself and Putin. He said he would speak to European leaders soon after his talks with Putin and that his goal was a speedy ceasefire in the bloody conflict.
Trump has in the past talked about land swaps but neither Russia nor Ukraine have been interested in ceding land to each other as part of a peace deal. Europeans worry that major concessions to Russia could create security problems for the West in the future.
Ukraine has sought to push back Russian invaders ever since the largest and deadliest war in Europe since World War Two began in February 2022. Russia justifies the war on the grounds of what it calls threats to its security from a Ukrainian pivot towards the West. Kyiv and its Western allies say the invasion is an imperial-style land grab.
Russia currently occupies about a fifth of Ukrainian territory, while Ukraine holds barely any Russian territory.
Trump said: “There’ll be some land swapping going on.”
“I know that through Russia and through conversations with everybody, to the good of Ukraine,” he said. He said Russia had occupied some “very prime territory” but that “we’re going to try to get some of that territory back”.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, Nandita Bose and Steve Holland in Washington; Editing by Mark Porter)
