Trump vows not to be intimidated ahead of Putin summit
APP
ANCHORAGE: US President Donald Trump insisted he would not be intimidated by Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the eve of a high-stakes summit and said Ukraine would be involved in any deal on its fate.
Putin flies to Alaska on Friday at the invitation of Trump in his first visit to a Western country since he ordered the 2022 invasion of Ukraine that has killed tens of thousands of people.
As Russia made gains on the battlefield, the Kremlin said the two presidents planned to meet one-on-one, heightening fears of European leaders that Putin will cajole Trump into a settlement imposed on Kyiv.
Trump insisted to reporters at the White House: “I am president, and he’s not going to mess around with me.”
“I’ll know within the first two minutes, three minutes, four minutes or five minutes… whether or not we’re going to have a good meeting or a bad meeting,” Trump said.
“And if it’s a bad meeting, it’ll end very quickly, and if it’s a good meeting, we’re going to end up getting peace in the pretty near future,” said Trump, who gave the summit a one-in-four chance of failure.
Trump has voiced admiration for Putin in the past and faced wide criticism after a 2018 summit in Helsinki where he appeared to accept the Russian’s denials of US intelligence on Moscow’s meddling in US elections.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not invited to the Alaska summit, which he has denounced as a reward to Putin, and has refused Trump’s calls to surrender territory.
Trump promised not to finalize any deal with Putin alone, and said he hoped to hold a three-way summit with Zelensky, possibly immediately afterwards in Alaska.
