President Donald Trump answers questions during a signing ceremony with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev (L), and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan (R) in the East Room of the White House on Friday. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump said he and Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet next week in the United States as Trump pushes for a peace agreement that could require Ukraine to make major territorial concessions.
The two leaders will meet Aug. 15 in Alaska, Trump said Friday in a social media post, to try to forge a truce to end the war in Ukraine that Russia started 3½ years ago by invading the country. Trump did not say whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would be attending.
Earlier in the afternoon, Trump told reporters the terms of a peace agreement may require Ukraine to cede territory to Russia, a concession that would be difficult to accept for the country and its European supporters.
"You're looking at territory that's been fought over for 3½ years with -- you know, a lot of Russians have died, a lot of Ukrainians have died," Trump said. "There'll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both."
Movement toward a summit between Trump and Putin has accelerated rapidly since Wednesday, when Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff met with Putin for three hours in Moscow. Witkoff left the meeting with a proposal from Putin, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio said "for the first time" provided "concrete examples of the kinds of things that Russia would ask for in order to end the war."
What Trump meant by swapping territory is unclear. Ukraine controls only around four square miles of Russian land in the western Kursk region. Russia, meanwhile, controls around a fifth of Ukraine's sovereign territory. In August 2024, Ukraine seized around 500 square miles of Russia, but after a year-long retreat, most of that bargaining chip is gone, and talk of territorial exchange has dwindled.
Russia has long insisted that it wants any deal to recognize its control over Crimea, which it illegally annexed in 2014, and four other regions of eastern Ukraine: Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Russia controls all of Luhansk, but has not managed to take full control of Donetsk region, where it has still not captured key cities.
Russian forces were pushed out of Kherson city in a Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2022 but still control part of the region. Moscow also holds parts of Zaporizhzhia region, but has never reached the regional capital by the same name, which remains heavily populated with Ukrainians, including many who fled the front line. Ukraine has made clear any deal ceding uncaptured territory to Russia would be unacceptable.
Zelensky faces constitutional limits in Ukraine over any concession of territory, Trump also noted.
"You know, he's not authorized to do certain things," Trump said, referring to Zelensky. "I said, 'Well, you're going to have to get it fast because, you know, we're getting very close to a deal.' And he's doing that."
This is a developing story. It will be updated.