LONDON — Europe is scrambling to stop itself and Ukraine from being frozen out of peace talks between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, fearing they could reshape the military and political future of the Continent without them.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself recounted upward of 15 phone calls with world leaders and others this weekend, from France and Germany to the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, as news sunk in that there may be no one at the meeting from the country that has been occupied and bombed for more than three years.
“We cannot accept” territorial questions being “discussed or even decided between Russia and America over the heads of Europeans and Ukrainians,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told his country’s state broadcaster ARD on Sunday. “I assume that the American government sees it the same way.”
Sidelined from the Trump-Putin tete-a-tete, Merz and other European leaders issued a joint statement Sunday saying that “the path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine.”
Trump announced last week that he would join Putin in Alaska on Friday for their first face-to-face discussion of his second term, and the first with the Russian president by any G-7 leader since Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Citing a senior U.S. official and three people briefed on the internal discussions, NBC News reported Saturday that the White House was considering inviting Zelenskyy to the meeting.
But Zelenskyy’s office told NBC News by phone Monday that there was no final decision.
Trump outlined the potential terms of the deal Friday.
“There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both,” Trump said, only to be swiftly rejected by Zelenskyy hours later. “Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupier,” the Ukrainian leader said.
Russia has always outright dismissed the idea that Ukraine should be part of these talks. It is also demanding that Ukraine cede control of the eastern regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, not just the parts of those territories that Moscow currently occupies and that make up around 20% of Ukraine’s total territory.
Though Zelenskyy has noisily rejected that at every turn, what really worries many of his supporters is that Ukraine will be forced to hand over these lands without the appropriate “security guarantees” from its allies, perhaps in the form of peacekeeper deployments in the hope of deterring Putin from simply regrouping to launch his next aggression.
“The angst is that, in Trump’s desire to have some sort of deal, it’s going to be a really bad deal for Ukraine,” Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, an ex-commanding officer in the British Armed Forces, told NBC News in a telephone interview Monday. “This seems to be a deal between the gangster and the real estate mogul. But actually the real people involved, who should be involved, are not.”
The Europeans issued their statement Sunday after being hosted by British Foreign Secretary David Lammy at his official residence in Chevening, a 17th century mansion set in a sprawling estate southwest of London. But Lammy’s main guest over the weekend was Vice President JD Vance, who stopped by before the European guests while on vacation in the United Kingdom with his family.
Vance and Lammy shared a perhaps unlikely connection — given their right and left politics, respectively — bonding over fishing and their shared working-class roots and Christian faith.
But in an interview with Fox News, the vice president, a longtime skeptic of America’s support of Ukraine, made the geopolitical differences clear.
“We’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business,” he said. “Americans, I think, are sick of continuing to send their money and tax dollars to this particular conflict. If the Europeans want to step up and buy weapons from American producers, we’re OK with that,” he added. “If you care so much about this conflict, you should be willing to play a direct and more substantial” role.
That is a much more hard-line way of stating what Trump has already pledged himself: that the United States is willing to get weapons to Ukraine but only if European allies pay for them.
The flurry of diplomacy aside, it is still the case that Russia and Ukraine remain diametrically opposed in what they want from peace talks. As well as more Ukrainian land, Russia wants a promise that Ukraine will neuter its army and never join NATO, something its critics say would make Kyiv a vassal of Moscow.
Ukraine wants mainly to survive as a nation and stop the hemorrhaging of people and resources it has been forced to commit to in fighting off its attacker.
