Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy and European leaders will meet Donald Trump in Washington on Monday to map out a peace deal amid fears the US could try to pressure Kyiv into accepting a settlement favourable to Moscow.
The leaders of Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Finland and Nato hope to shore up Mr Zelenskiy at a crucial diplomatic moment in the war and prevent any repetition of the bad-tempered Oval Office encounter between Mr Trump and Ukraine’s leader in February.
Mr Trump’s relations with European leaders can be prickly, and it is notable that the group includes several who he reportedly likes: Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Britain’s Keir Starmer, Finland’s Alexander Stubb and Nato secretary general Mark Rutte, along with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.
Mr Trump will meet Mr Zelenskiy at 1.15pm (5.15pm Irish time) in the Oval Office and then all the European leaders together in the White House’s East Room at 3pm (7pm Irish time), the White House said.
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The meetings follow a summit held in Alaska on Friday between Mr Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin, and claims by a White House envoy that Russia has dropped its opposition to the West providing Nato-style defence pledges to Kyiv.
Speaking on Sunday, US secretary of state Marco Rubio said Russia and Ukraine were both “going to have to make concessions” for there to be a peaceful resolution to the war.
After rolling out the red carpet for Mr Putin in Alaska on Friday, Mr Trump said an agreement should be struck to end the 42-month-long war which has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions. “Russia is a very big power, and they’re not,” Mr Trump said of Ukraine afterwards.
However, Mr Zelenskiy has already all but rejected the outline of Mr Putin’s proposals at that meeting, including for Ukraine to give up the rest of its eastern Donetsk region, of which it currently controls a quarter.
“We need real negotiations, which means we can start where the front line is now,” the Ukrainian leader said in Brussels on Sunday, adding that his country’s constitution made it impossible for him to give away territory.
More concerning for him is the fact that Mr Trump, who previously favoured Kyiv’s proposal for an immediate ceasefire to conduct deeper peace talks, reversed course after the summit and indicated support for Russia’s favoured approach of negotiating a comprehensive deal while fighting continues.
“I am grateful to the President of the United States for the invitation. We all equally want to end this war swiftly and reliably,” Mr Zelenskiy said on the Telegram messaging app after arriving in Washington late on Sunday. “Russia must end this war – the war it started. And I hope that our shared strength with America and with our European friends will compel Russia to real peace.”
[ The Irish Times view on the Trump-Putin summit: a shameful day in AlaskaOpens in new window ]
Mr Zelenskiy also said on X that any deal must be “not like it was years ago, when Ukraine was forced to give up Crimea and part of our East – part of Donbas – and Putin simply used it as a springboard for a new attack”.
“Or when Ukraine was given so called ‘security guarantees’ in 1994, but they didn’t work,” the Ukrainian president said.
In interviews on Sunday, Mr Rubio said the talks in Alaska had “made progress in the sense that we identified potential areas of agreement – but there remains some big areas of disagreement”.
He added: “We’re still a long ways off. We’re not at the precipice of a peace agreement. We’re not at the edge of one. But I do think progress was made towards one.”
Mr Trump’s Ukraine envoy, Steve Witkoff, said Mr Putin had agreed that the US and European allies could offer Ukraine a Nato-style, “article 5-like” security guarantee as part of an eventual deal to end the war. The article 5 clause of Nato’s founding treaty enshrines the principle of collective defence, the notion that an attack on a single member is considered an attack on them all.
Mr Witkoff added that Russia had agreed to unspecified concessions on five Ukrainian regions central to the war, particularly the eastern Donetsk province.
“We agreed to robust security guarantees that I would describe as game-changing,” he said.
Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s envoy to international organisations in Vienna, said early on Monday that Russia agreed that any future peace agreement must provide security guarantees to Kyiv, but added that Russia “has equal right to expect that Moscow will also get efficient security guarantees”.
European Union council president Antonio Costa said he “welcomed the United States’s willingness to participate in providing security guarantees to Ukraine”.
Fearing that they would be shut out of the conversation after a summit to which they were not invited, European leaders held a call with Mr Zelenskiy on Sunday to align on a common strategy for the meeting with Mr Trump on Monday.
The presence of six allies to back Mr Zelenskiy may alleviate painful memories of his last Oval Office visit.
“It’s important for the Europeans to be there: [Trump] respects them, he behaves differently in their presence,” Oleksandr Merezhko, a Ukrainian lawmaker from Mr Zelenskiy’s ruling party.
But Mr Rubio, speaking to CBS, dismissed the idea that the European leaders were coming to Washington to protect the Ukrainian leader.
“They’re not coming here tomorrow to keep Zelenskiy from being bullied. They’re coming here tomorrow because we’ve been working with the Europeans,” he said. “We invited them to come.”
Relations between Kyiv and Washington, once extremely close, have been rocky since Mr Trump took office in January.
However, Ukraine’s pressing need for US weapons and intelligence sharing, some of which have no viable alternative, has forced Mr Zelenskiy and his allies on the continent to appease Mr Trump, even when his statements appear contradictory to their objectives.
On the battlefield Russia has been slowly grinding forward, pressing home its advantages in men and firepower. Mr Putin says he is ready to continue fighting until his military objectives are achieved.
Ukraine hopes that the changing technological nature of the war and its ability to inflict massive casualties on Moscow will allow it to hold out, supported by European financial and military aid even if relations with Washington collapse.
