Trump urged Ukraine’s Zelenskiy to make concessions to Russia, sources say

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By Gram Slattery and Tom Balmforth

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to give up swaths of territory to Russia during a tense meeting on Friday that left the Ukrainian delegation disappointed, according to two people briefed on the discussion.

Trump also declined to provide Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine’s use, and mused about giving security guarantees to both Kyiv and Moscow, comments that the Ukrainian delegation found confusing, added the two sources, who requested anonymity to discuss a private meeting.

After his meeting with Zelenskiy, Trump publicly called for a ceasefire on the current frontlines, a position that the Ukrainian president then embraced in comments to reporters. A third person said Trump came up with that proposal during the meeting after Zelenskiy said he would not voluntarily cede any territory to Moscow.

Still, the meeting was a clear disappointment for Zelenskiy, who had hoped to convince Trump to supply his government with long-range Tomahawk missiles capable of hitting deep inside Russia.

Elements of the talks were first reported by The Financial Times on Sunday.

In recent weeks, there had been indications Trump was deprioritizing efforts to force a deal on Kyiv and Moscow, in favor of throwing his full support behind the Ukrainians.

But the Friday meeting indicates that Trump may revert to mediating a deal. U.S. officials repeatedly brought up the possibility of a territorial swap between Ukraine and Russia — an idea that Trump had embraced earlier in the year — and the U.S. president said a quick agreement was essential, the sources said.

“It was pretty bad,” one of the sources said. “The message was, ‘Your country will freeze, and your country will be destroyed'” if Ukraine doesn’t make a deal with Russia.

Trump resorted to profanity several times throughout the meeting, the source said.

Two sources were left with the impression that Trump was influenced by a Thursday call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. During that call, The Washington Post reported that Putin proposed a territorial swap in which Ukraine would cede the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in return for small parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

One of the sources said that U.S. officials proposed precisely that swap to Zelenskiy on Friday. But Ukrainians see major strategic value in the portion of Donetsk and Luhansk that they still hold — they believe giving up that territory would make the rest of Ukraine much more vulnerable to Russian offensives, the person said.

“We will give nothing to the aggressor, and we will forget nothing,” Zelenskiy said during his nightly video address on Sunday. “We clearly see that this Russia is a long-term threat.”

On Thursday, before meeting Zelenskiy, Trump said he would soon meet Putin in Budapest. A Kremlin aide said shortly after that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov would speak in the coming days to prepare for the summit.

The White House and the Ukrainian president’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

(Reporting by Gram Slattery in Washington and Tom Balmforth in London, Anusha Shah in Bengaluru; editing by Philippa Fletcher and Diane Craft)