US President Donald Trump boards Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. Photographer: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
(Bloomberg) — US President Donald Trump said he would be speaking to European leaders shortly as he prepares for his summit later this week with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
“Will be speaking to European Leaders in a short while. They are great people who want to see a deal done,” Trump wrote on social media Wednesday.
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The call comes as Trump ramps up diplomatic efforts to end Russia’s war in Ukraine — now well into its fourth year — with a face—to-face meeting with Putin on American soil.
WATCH: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, along with the leaders of France, Germany, the UK, Italy, Poland and Finland, will hold a call with Trump and Vice President JD Vance ahead of the summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Source: Bloomberg
The sitdown slated for Friday in Alaska has raised worries among Kyiv’s allies that the US and Russian presidents may negotiate a deal that swaps land for peace without Ukraine’s input or leaves Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy sidelined or without the security assurances needed to deter further aggression.
Earlier: European Leaders Want to Speak to Trump Before He Meets Putin
Trump has said that there may be “some changes” in land, but has also sought to downplay expectations for the summit, casting it as a “feel-out meeting” and saying that he would confer with Ukrainian and European leaders after his gathering with Putin.
“I’m going to be telling him, ‘You got to end this war. You got to end it,’” Trump said Monday at a White House press conference. “I may leave and say, ‘Good luck,’ and that’ll be the end. I may say this is not going to be settled.”
Trump lashed out at what he said was “very unfair media” ahead of the Putin summit in a subsequent social media post on Wednesday.
“If I got Moscow and Leningrad free, as part of the deal with Russia, the Fake News would say that I made a bad deal!,” Trump wrote.
Zelenskiy has ruled out Putin’s demand for territory that Moscow does not control as a pre-condition for a ceasefire, saying that he would need to seek constitutional approval for such a move. That explanation appeared to rankle Trump earlier this week.
Trump has indicated that he did not plan to invite Zelenskiy to the summit, saying the next step after the bilateral meeting would be for Putin and the Ukrainian president to meet directly. Trump offered to mediate that conversation, if necessary.
The call with European leaders follows a weekend of diplomacy between US, Ukrainian and European officials. European leaders have said that any peace agreement must “respect international law, including the principles of independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity.”
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Sanctions Pressure
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent highlighted the tensions between the US and European nations in a Wednesday interview on , casting allies as being unwilling to follow Washington’s lead in using so-called secondary sanctions to punish countries that purchase Russian energy supplies.
“President Trump is meeting with President Putin, and the Europeans are in the wings carping about how he should do it, what he should do it. But the Europeans need to join us in these sanctions. They need to,” Bessent said.
“It’s put up or shut up time. The President is creating his own leverage. We need the Europeans to come in and help create more leverage,” he added.
Trump had threatened sanctions on Russia with a fresh deadline. But even after that deadline passed he has so far refrained from taking direct action on the Kremlin beyond applying additional tariffs on India over its purchases of Russian oil. The US president last week announced that he was doubling the US tariff on Indian goods to 50% from 25% as a penalty for New Delhi’s Russian energy buys.
WATCH: European leaders need to be willing to work with the US on sanctioning Russian oil buyers, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says. Source: Bloomberg
Kyiv’s allies see Russian energy purchases by countries including India and China as propping up Putin’s economy and helping the Kremlin undercut global sanctions.
“I was at the G-7 meeting in Canada with President Trump and the Europeans kept talking about Senator Graham’s bill to do the secondary tariffs,” Bessent said in the interview, referring to legislation by Senator Lindsey Graham in the US Congress that would impose tougher penalties on countries that buy Russian oil products.
“I looked at all the leaders around the table, and I said ‘Is everyone at this table willing to put a 200% tariff, secondary tariff on China? And you know what? Everybody wanted to see what kind of shoes they were wearing.”
–With assistance from Annmarie Hordern and Jonathan Ferro.
(Updates to add additional remarks from Trump and Bessent, details and background starting in 7th paragraph)
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