(AFP) — Ukraine won’t give up land to Russia, President Volodymyr Zelensky warned early on Saturday, hours after Washington and Moscow agreed to hold a summit in a bid to end the war.
Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will meet in the far-north US state of Alaska, near Russia, on August 15, to try to resolve the three-year conflict, despite multiple warnings from Ukraine and Europe that Kyiv must be part of the negotiations.
Announcing the summit on Friday, Trump said that “there’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both” Ukraine and Russia, without providing further details.
“Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier,” Zelensky said on social media hours later.
“Any decisions against us, any decisions without Ukraine, are also decisions against peace. They will achieve nothing,” he said, adding that the war “cannot be ended without us, without Ukraine”.
Three rounds of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine this year have failed to bear fruit, and it remains unclear whether a summit would bring peace any closer.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with millions forced to flee their homes.
Putin has resisted multiple calls from the United States, Europe and Kyiv for a ceasefire.
Zelensky said Kyiv was “ready for real decisions that can bring peace” but said it should be a “dignified peace”, without giving details.
The former KGB officer in power in Russia for over 25 years has also ruled out holding talks with Zelensky at this stage.
Ukraine’s leader has been pushing to make it a three-way summit and has frequently said meeting Putin is the only way to make progress towards peace.
The summit in Alaska, which Russia sold to the United States in 1867, would be the first between sitting US and Russian presidents since Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva in June 2021. This was just nine months before Moscow sent troops to Ukraine.
Zelensky said of the location that it is “very far away from this war, which is raging on our land, against our people”.
The Kremlin said the choice was “logical” because the state close to the Arctic is on the border between the two countries, and this is where their “economic interests intersect”.
Moscow has also invited Trump to pay a reciprocal visit to Russia later.
Trump and Putin last sat together in 2019 at a G20 summit meeting in Japan during Trump’s first term. They have spoken by telephone several times since January.
On Friday, Putin held a round of calls with allies, including China and India, in a diplomatic flurry ahead of the summit with Trump, who has spent his first months in office trying to broker peace in Ukraine without making a breakthrough.
The US president has earlier imposed an additional tariff on India for buying Russia’s oil in a bid to nudge Moscow into talks. He also threatened to impose a similar tax on China, but so far has refrained from doing so.
Away from the talks, across the more than 1,000-kilometre (600-mile) frontline, Russia and Ukraine continued pouring dozens of drones on each other in an overnight exchange of attacks on Saturday.
As a result of that, a bus carrying civilians was hit in Ukraine’s frontline city of Kherson, killing two people and wounding six.
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