Trump to meet Putin in Alaska on Aug 15

AFP
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on August 15 in Alaska to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, Trump said on Friday.
Trump made the highly anticipated announcement on social media after he said that the parties, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, were close to a ceasefire deal that could resolve the three-and-a-half-year conflict, one that could require Ukraine to surrender significant territory.
Addressing reporters at the White House earlier on Friday, Trump suggested an agreement would involve some exchange of land.
“There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both,” the Republican president said. The Kremlin subsequently confirmed the summit in an online statement.
The two leaders will “focus on discussing options for achieving a long-term peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian crisis,” Putin aide Yuri Ushakov said.
“This will evidently be a challenging process, but we will engage in it actively and energetically,” Ushakov said.
In his evening address to the nation on Friday, Zelensky said it was possible to achieve a ceasefire as long as adequate pressure was applied to Russia. He said he had held more than a dozen conversations with leaders of different countries, and his team was in constant contact with the United States.
Putin claims four Ukrainian regions – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – as well as the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which he annexed in 2014. His forces do not fully control all the territory in the four regions.