President Volodymyr Zelensky warned early on Saturday that Ukraine won’t give up land to Russia, 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, and it is unclear if a summit would bring peace closer.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and millions have been forced to flee their homes.
Putin has resisted calls for a ceasefire from the US, Europe, and Kyiv.
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 nearly 25 years has also ruled out holding talks with Zelensky at this stage.
Ukraine’s leader has pushed for a three-way summit and has repeatedly stated that seeing Putin is the only way to make progress towards peace.
The summit in Alaska, which Russia surrendered to the US in 1867, would be the first meeting between sitting US and Russian presidents since Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva in June 2021. This was only nine months before Moscow sent soldiers 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”.
Putin has also invited Trump to pay a reciprocal visit to Russia later.
Trump and Putin last met in 2019 at a G20 summit in Japan during Trump’s first term. They have spoken by phone 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 success.
Russia and Ukraine exchanged drone attacks across a 1,000-kilometre (600-mile) frontline overnight on Saturday, resulting in a bus carrying civilians being hit in Ukraine’s frontline city of Kherson, killing two and injuring six.
