Trump, Putin to talk peace in Alaska
Meeting viewed as breakthrough to end Russia-Ukraine War
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Donald Trump meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin next Friday in Alaska to discuss ending the war in Ukraine, a potential breakthrough after weeks of expressing frustration that more was not being done to quell the fighting.
The Kremlin has not yet confirmed the details, which Trump announced on social media, but both nations had said they expected a meeting could happen as soon as next week.
Such a summit may prove pivotal in a war that began more than three years ago when Russia invaded its western neighbor and has led to tens of thousands of deaths -- although there's no guarantee it will stop the fighting since Moscow and Kyiv remain far apart on their conditions for peace.
In comments to reporters at the White House before his post confirming the date and place, Trump suggested that any agreement would likely involve "some swapping of territories," but he gave no details. Analysts, including some close to the Kremlin, have suggested that Russia could offer to give up territory it controls outside of the four regions it claims to have annexed.
Trump said his meeting with Putin would come before any sit-down discussion involving Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump also previously agreed to meet with Putin even if the Russian leader would not meet with Zelenskyy. That stoked fears in Europe that Ukraine could be sidelined in efforts to stop the continent's biggest conflict since World War II.
Trump's announcement that he planned to host one of America's adversaries on U.S. soil broke with expectations that they'd meet in a third country. The gesture gives Putin validation after the U.S. and its allies had long sought to make him a pariah over his war against Ukraine.
Early in Putin's tenure, he regularly met with his U.S. counterparts. That dropped off and the tone became icier as tensions mounted between Russia and the West after Moscow illegally annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and faced allegations of meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections.
Putin's last visit to the U.S. was in 2015, when he attended the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York. The meeting in Alaska would be the first U.S.-Russia summit since 2021, when former President Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva.
After announcing Friday a framework aimed at ending decades of conflict elsewhere in the world -- between Armenia and Azerbaijan -- Trump said he would meet with Putin "very shortly."
His subsequent post said "the highly anticipated meeting" would happen Aug. 15 in Alaska and more details would follow.