By Gram Slattery, Tom Balmforth and Jeff Mason
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 conversation.
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.
“The meeting ended with (Trump’s) decision to make a ‘deal where we are, on the demarcation line,'” the third source said.
Trump underscored that position in remarks to reporters on Sunday.
“We think that what they should do is just stop at the lines where they are, the battle lines,” he said on Air Force One. “The rest is very tough to negotiate if you’re going to say, ‘you take this, we take that.'”
Asked if he had told Zelenskiy that Ukraine must cede all of the Donbas region to Russia, Trump said no. “Let it be cut the way it is. It’s cut up right now. I think 78% of the land is already taken by Russia,” Trump said in response to a question from a Reuters reporter.
“You leave it the way it is right now. They can…negotiate something later on down the line,” he said.
Overall, while not a disaster for the Ukrainians, the Friday discussion 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.
Trump has not decided whether to make Tomahawks available, U.S. Vice President JD Vance told a group of reporters on Sunday night.
The Ukrainian president’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 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.
After meeting with Zelenskiy at the U.N. General Assembly in September, for instance, Trump speculated that Ukraine could take back all of the territory it had lost to Russia, a possibility even Kyiv sees as remote.
But the Friday meeting indicates that Trump may once again be pushing for a deal as quickly as possible, even if it is on terms that are unpalatable for Kyiv.
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 during the Friday meeting that a quick agreement was essential, the sources said.
SWAYED BY PUTIN?
“It was pretty bad,” one of the sources said of the meeting. “The message was, ‘Your country will freeze, and your country will be destroyed'” if Ukraine doesn’t make a deal with Russia.
A separate source denied that Trump said Ukraine would be “destroyed.”
Both sources said, however, that Trump resorted to profanity several times.
Two sources had the impression that Trump was influenced by a Thursday call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. During that call, according to The Washington Post, 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.
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, said one of the people briefed about the meeting. That source argued that giving up western Donetsk and Luhansk would amount to an act of “suicide.”
Two of the sources said U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff was among those who most aggressively urged the Ukrainians to agree to Russia’s swap proposal. Witkoff mentioned that Donetsk and Luhansk have significant Russian-speaking populations, one of the sources said, a point he has made publicly before.
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.
In the Friday meeting, U.S. officials said Rubio planned to meet with Lavrov on the coming Thursday, one of the sources said. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A previous meeting between Trump and Putin in Alaska in August yielded no breakthroughs.
(Reporting by Gram Slattery in Washington, Tom Balmforth in London and Jeff Mason aboard Air Force One; additional reporting by Anusha Shah, Ronald Popeski and Humeyra Pamuk; editing by Philippa Fletcher, Diane Craft, Sergio Non and Lincoln Feast.)
