Trump Urged Ukraine’s Zelenskyy To Make Concessions To Russia In Tense Meeting, Sources Say

WASHINGTON, Oct 19 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to give territory to Russia during a tense meeting on Friday, disappointing the Ukrainian delegation, according to two people with knowledge of the discussion.

Trump also ruled out providing Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine’s use and considered providing security guarantees to both Kiev and Moscow. The Ukrainian delegation found it confusing, said two sources, who requested anonymity to discuss a private meeting.

After his meeting with Zelenskyy, Trump publicly called for a ceasefire on the current fronts; The Ukrainian president later adopted this stance in comments to journalists. A third person said Trump came up with the proposal during the meeting after Zelenskyy said he would not voluntarily cede any territory to Moscow.

“The meeting ended with (Trump’s) decision to make a deal ‘where we are, at the border line,'” the third source said.

Trump underlined this stance in his statements to reporters on Sunday.

“We think what they need to do is just stay where they are, on the battle lines,” he said aboard Air Force One. “If you say, ‘You take this, we will take that,’ it is very difficult to negotiate the rest.”

When asked if he told Zelenskyy that Ukraine should cede the entire Donbas region to Russia, Trump said no. Answering a question from a Reuters reporter, Trump said, “Let it be cut as it is. It is being cut right now. I think 78 percent of the land is already in Russia’s hands.”

“You leave it as it is right now. They… they can negotiate something later,” he said.

While not a disaster for Ukrainians overall, Friday’s debate was a clear disappointment for Zelenskyy, who had hoped to persuade Trump to supply his government with long-range Tomahawk missiles capable of striking deep into Russia.

Trump has not decided whether he will make Tomahawks available, Vice President J.D. Vance told a group of reporters Sunday night.

The Ukrainian presidential office did not respond to a request for comment. Elements of the talks were first reported by The Financial Times on Sunday.

In recent weeks, there have been indications that Trump is abandoning his efforts to force Kiev and Moscow to agree and is throwing his full support behind the Ukrainians.

For example, after meeting Zelenskyy at the UN General Assembly in September, Trump speculated that Ukraine could regain all of the territory it lost to Russia, a possibility that even Kiev sees as remote.

But Friday’s meeting shows that Trump may once again push for a deal as soon as possible, even if it has terms that are unpleasant for Kiev.

U.S. officials have repeatedly raised the possibility of a territorial swap between Ukraine and Russia — an idea Trump embraced earlier this year — and the U.S. president said a quick deal was essential at Friday’s meeting, the sources said.

“It was pretty bad,” one of the sources said of the meeting. “The message was: ‘Your country will be frozen, your country will be destroyed.’” If Ukraine doesn’t make a deal with Russia.

A separate source denied that Trump said Ukraine would be “destroyed.”

But both sources said Trump used profanity several times.

Two sources obtained the impression that Trump was impressed by his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday. During this meeting, Putin proposed a land swap in which Ukraine would cede the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in exchange for small parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, according to The Washington Post.

U.S. officials suggested exactly that swap to Zelenskyy on Friday, one of the sources said.

One of the people briefed on the meeting said that the Ukrainians see the part of Donetsk and Luhansk they still hold as of great strategic value, and believe that giving up this region would make the rest of Ukraine much more vulnerable to Russian attacks. This source argued that giving up western Donetsk and Luhansk would amount to an act of “suicide”.

U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff was among those most aggressively urging the Ukrainians to accept Russia’s swap offer, two of the sources said. According to one of the sources, Witkoff stated that there are significant Russian-speaking populations in Donetsk and Luhansk, and he had previously made this point public.

Before meeting Zelenskyy on Thursday, Trump said he would soon meet Putin in Budapest. A Kremlin official said shortly after that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov would speak in the coming days in preparation for the summit.

At Friday’s meeting, U.S. officials said Rubio planned to meet with Lavrov next Thursday, one of the sources said. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The previous meeting between Trump and Putin in Alaska in August did not produce any progress.

(Reporting by Gram Slattery in Washington, Tom Balmforth in London and Jeff Mason at Air Force One; Additional reporting by Anusha Shah, Ronald Popeski and Humeyra Pamuk; Reporting by Philippa Fletcher, Diane Craft, Sergio Non and Lincoln Feast.)