In a Trump-Putin Summit, Ukraine Fears Losing Say Over Its Future

For nearly three years of the war in Ukraine, Washington’s rallying cry in backing a fight against a Russian invasion was “no negotiations about Ukraine without Ukraine.”

But when President Trump meets President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Alaska on Friday, the Ukrainians will not be there, barring any last-minute invitation. And Kyiv’s swift rejection of Mr. Trump’s declaration that he is already negotiating with Russia over “land swaps,” with no mention of security guarantees or arms for Ukraine, underscores the risks for the Ukrainians — and the political perils for Mr. Trump.

Ukraine’s fear for these past six months has been that Mr. Trump’s image of a “peace accord” is a deal struck directly between him and Mr. Putin — much as Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill divided up Europe at the Yalta conference in 1945. That meeting has become synonymous with historical debates over what can go wrong when great powers carve up the world, smaller powers suffer the consequences and free people find themselves cast under authoritarian rule.

“Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier,” Mr. Zelensky said, noting that the Ukrainian constitution prohibits such a deal.

Then, in what sounded like a direct warning to Mr. Trump, he added: “Any solutions that are against us, any solutions that are without Ukraine, are simultaneously solutions against peace. They will not bring anything. These are dead solutions.”

Mr. Zelensky is the one with the most on the line in the summit. After his bitter Oval Office encounter with Mr. Trump in February, which ended in Mr. Trump’s declaration that “you don’t have the cards right now,” he has every reason to fear Mr. Trump is at best an unreliable partner. At worst, Mr. Trump is susceptible to being flattered and played by Mr. Putin, for whom he has often expressed admiration.

But there are also considerable political risks for Mr. Trump. Those would be especially acute if he is viewed as forcing millions of Ukrainians into territorial concessions, with few compensating guarantees that Mr. Putin would not, after taking a breather of a few years, seize the rest of the country.

“President Trump still seems to be going into this conversation as if Putin is negotiating as a partner or friend,” said Tressa Guenov, the director for programs and operations at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. “That will continue to make these discussions difficult if Ukraine isn’t involved.”

Mr. Trump’s personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, raised the possibility of a meeting of Mr. Trump, Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Putin, and in the past week, it looked like that might be a precondition for the session in Alaska. But Mr. Trump waved away the notion when asked about it by reporters on Friday.

A senior administration official said on Saturday that the president remained open to a trilateral meeting with Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky, but that the meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin was set to go ahead as scheduled.

Yet the gap in how Mr. Trump approaches these negotiations and how the United States’ allies in Europe approach them became all the more vivid on Saturday.

After a meeting of European national security advisers and Ukrainian officials with Vice President JD Vance, who is on a visit to Britain, leaders of the European Union’s executive branch and nations including France, Britain, Italy and Germany called in a statement for “active diplomacy, support to Ukraine and pressure on the Russian Federation to end their illegal war.”

They added that any agreement needed to include “robust and credible security guarantees that enable Ukraine to effectively defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” phrases Mr. Trump has avoided. “The path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine,” the leaders said.

Mr. Trump has long sought a direct meeting with Mr. Putin, declaring publicly that a problem like Ukraine could only be resolved with a meeting between the two top leaders. He also said last week that he expects to see President Xi Jinping of China before the end of the year. And he seems reluctant to impose more tariffs or sanctions ahead of those meetings. In fact, his deadline for Mr. Putin to declare a cease-fire or face crushing “secondary sanctions” melted away on Friday without a mention from Mr. Trump, other than that people should wait for his meeting with Mr. Putin.

The fact that Mr. Trump is even meeting with Mr. Putin represents a small victory for the Russian president, Ms. Guenov said.

“Trump still has given Putin the benefit of the doubt, and that dynamic is one Putin will attempt to exploit even beyond this meeting,” she added.

While Mr. Trump has insisted that an understanding between himself and the Russian president is crucial to a broader peace, Mr. Putin, Ms. Guenov said, would certainly welcome any land concessions Mr. Trump is willing to grant.

Already the president has signaled that is where these talks are headed. Mr. Trump on Friday suggested that a peace deal between the two countries could include “some swapping of territories,” signaling that the United States may join Russia in trying to compel Ukraine to permanently cede some of its land — the suggestion flatly rejected by Mr. Zelensky.

“We’re going to get some back, and we’re going to get some switched,” said Mr. Trump, leaving unclear who the “we” in that statement was. “There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both, but we’ll be talking about that either later, or tomorrow.”

Russian officials have demanded that Ukraine cede the four regions that Moscow claimed to have “annexed” from Ukraine in late 2022, even as some of that land remains under Ukrainian control. And Russia is seeking a formal declaration that the Crimean peninsula is once again its territory. (Yalta, where the meeting of three great powers was held 80 years ago, is a resort city on the southern coast of Crimea.)

Until late last week, it appeared likely that the meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin would be held on the traditional neutral grounds of the old Cold War, perhaps in Geneva or Vienna. President Biden saw Mr. Putin in Geneva in June 2021, eight months before the Ukraine invasion, for what turned out to be the only face-to-face meeting of their presidencies.

Mr. Putin’s willingness to venture into American territory was striking, not least because his arrival in the United States will signal the end of his political and legal isolation from the country. In the past few months, Mr. Trump has terminated efforts at the Justice Department and the State Department to collect evidence of war crimes committed by Russia during its invasion of Ukraine. But inviting Mr. Putin to meet in the United States seemed to extinguish any threat that the United States would provide evidence to the prosecution.

“It’s bewildering how we could bring in somebody the International Criminal Court has classified as a war criminal,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the president of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, who has tracked many of the Russian violations.

But he emphasized that Mr. Putin is entering the meeting with Mr. Trump in an extraordinarily weak position economically, and that it would benefit U.S. negotiators to realize how few cards Russia holds.

“The mystical illusion of power that Putin creates is as real as the Wizard of Oz,” Mr. Sonnenfeld said. “The Russian economy has been imploding. Trump doesn’t seem to realize that.”

Mr. Sonnenfeld cautioned Mr. Trump against any deal in which Ukraine would give up rights to the Donbas region, particularly given the agreement that the Trump administration negotiated for the U.S. to share in future revenues from Ukraine’s mineral reserves through a joint investment fund.

“Giving up the Donbas would be disastrous,” he said. “That is where a lot of these valuable minerals are.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section

A

, Page

8

of the New York edition

with the headline:

Any Deal Without Ukraine Is No Deal, Zelensky Says. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe