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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky detailed his recent phone call with President Donald Trump and his take on a possible peace agreement with Russia during an interview Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press.
A trio of Trump advisers — Secretary of State Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff — are set to meet with Russian officials in Saudi Arabia next week to begin negotiations aimed at ending the war. Ukrainian officials have not yet confirmed whether they will be represented at the meeting.
Zelensky, meanwhile, is in Washington, D.C., and has met with the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as well as Vice President JD Vance in the past week. He also spoke with Trump on the phone.
The Ukrainian leader told NBC’s Kristen Welker that he trusts Trump to negotiate an end to the war, but cautioned that the president should not exclude Ukrainians from the conversation.
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“I trust President Trump because he’s the president of the United States, because your people, your people voted for him, and I respect their choice, and I will work the President Trump with trust, which I have to the United States,” Zelensky said.
“But of course I want to have real meeting, productive, without just words,” he added.
Trump needs “to hear us” and work with Zelensky to “make common plan, and to share it with allies, then with Russians, and stop this war,” he said.
“I think we need it urgently,” added Zelensky, who said that his team was working with the White House on setting up a meeting. But he did not say whether the president had directly invited him.
In the same interview, he seemed to lay out his country’s red line for peace negotiations: a refusal to cede any territory to Russia, including Crimea and all territory seized by Russian-aligned forces dating back to 2014. It’s a strategic goal that Trump and his secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, both said in the past week was an “unrealistic” demand.
“[I]t’s out of constitution [unconstitutional] to recognize our occupied territory [as the] territory of Russia. We will never do it. It’s not about – it’s not about any negotiations. We will never speak about it,” said Zelensky in his interview Sunday.
“Even Crimea, we will never recognize it,” he added.
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Trump, in his remarks to reporters on Wednesday after his phone call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, also stated that he did not believe Ukraine should join the NATO alliance at the conclusion of the war.
“The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement,” said the president, before adding that any security guarantees for Kyiv “must be backed by capable European and non-European troops.”
“I don’t see any way that a country in Russia’s position could allow them, just in their position, could allow them to join NATO. I don’t see that happening,” Trump added at a press gaggle.
Vance told reporters after his meeting with the Ukrainian president that the two countries still shared the same goals — protecting Ukraine and ending the growing death toll — even if the Trump administration and Zelensky disagreed about how best to achieve it.
“Fundamentally, the goal is as President (Donald) Trump outlined it: We want the war to come to a close,” Vance said Friday.
“We want the killing to stop, but we want to achieve a durable, lasting peace, not the kind of peace that’s going to have eastern Europe in conflict just a couple years down the road,” he added.
The conflict in Ukraine, which began in earnest with a Russian invasion in 2022, is now threatening to stretch into its fourth year with no end in sight. Zelensky, who on Sunday said that his country can “probably” fight on successfully without continued U.S. assistance, has fought the Russian invaders to a relative standstill — though Kyiv and other cities continue to be shelled by Russian attacks.
Overall, the total dead since the 2022 invasion is estimated to be approaching one million. The staggering toll includes civilians as well as forces aligned with Ukraine and Russia. Casualties among Russian forces are thought by U.S. intelligence to make up the bulk of the dead, with estimates putting the number north of 700,000.
