On Friday, we learned of an upcoming, face-to-face meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which meeting is to take place somewhere in Alaska on Friday, August 15th. Ukraine is certain to be among the topics of that meeting; President Trump has made it amply known that he wants to see an end to the Russo-Ukrainian War.
On Saturday, Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, spoke up, claiming - not without reason - that Ukraine should be part of any talks about an end to this war. President Zelensky also flatly rejects ceding any Ukrainian land to Russia as part of any such deal.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday rejected the idea that his country would give up land to end the war with Russia after U.S. President Donald Trump suggested a peace deal could include “some swapping of territories.”
Zelenskyy said Ukraine “will not give Russia any awards for what it has done” and that “Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier.”
The remarks came after Trump said Friday that he would meet with Vladimir Putin even if the Russian leader would not meet with Zelenskyy. The Trump-Putin meeting, scheduled for Friday in Alaska, is seen as a potential breakthrough in the more than three-year war.
Zelenskyy dismissed the planned summit, warning that any negotiations to end Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II must include Kyiv.
“Any decisions that are without Ukraine are at the same time decisions against peace. They will not bring anything. These are dead decisions. They will never work,” he said.
That's a fair point, but Ukraine isn't holding the best hand. At least one foreign-affairs analyst claims that President Trump is showing favor to Russia by holding the meeting in Alaska, which was once Russian America, but that's a canard.
Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told the AP that the “symbology” of holding the summit in Alaska was clear, and that the location “naturally favors Russia.”
“It’s easy to imagine Putin making the point. … We once had this territory and we gave it to you, therefore Ukraine had this territory and now should give it to us,” he said, referring to the 1867 transaction known as the Alaska Purchase when Russia sold Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million.
There's a rather huge difference. The United States purchased Alaska from Russia. We paid $7.2 million to the Russian Empire for Alaska at a time when the Russian Empire was badly short of hard currency. That was a transfer of territory agreed to by both sides; the same claim cannot be made for the parts of Ukraine that Russia invaded, took, and holds by force of arms.
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President Trump is making a rather curious move by meeting with Putin and not including Ukraine in the discussions, but then, Russia is the aggressor, and the larger, more powerful nation. Is President Trump thinking of pushing Putin to make concessions that they may not be willing to make with Ukraine's president staring daggers at him over the table?
Of course, any such deal will have to involve, at some point, some kind of summit between all three nations. Ukraine, as I've been saying for some time, doesn't hold the best cards here. At the very minimum, it seems certain that any deal will involve Russia keeping Crimea, at the very minimum.
Sooner or later, there will be some kind of a deal struck. The current conflict can't go on forever. Ukraine is right to be concerned about being left out of the Alaska summit, but it seems likely that the meeting in the Great Land will be one step into a long process involving all three nations, and likely the rest of Europe as well.
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