WASHINGTON — The White House is considering inviting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to Alaska, where President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin next week, according to a senior U.S. official and three people briefed on the internal discussions.
“It’s being discussed,” one of the people briefed on the discussions said.
A White House official also said Friday that the Russians have provided a list of demands for a potential ceasefire for the war in Ukraine, and the U.S. is trying to get buy-in from Ukrainians and European allies.
But in his message Saturday, Zelenskyy said any decision taken without Ukraine were “decisions against peace,” adding, “They will not achieve anything.”
The White House had not commented on Zelenskyy’s message by early Saturday.
Russia’s demands have previously included Ukraine ceding all the land that Putin claims to have annexed and accepting permanent neutrality, with a ban on Ukraine ever joining NATO.
Putin claims four Ukrainian regions — Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — as well as the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which he annexed in 2014. Russian forces do not fully control all the territory in each region.
It remains unclear whether Trump’s reference to “swapping” territories means formal cession of land or a withdrawal from areas currently under each side’s control.
Zelenskyy and Ukrainian officials have long said they would not concede any territory that Russia illegally annexed. Ukraine has also insisted that any agreement must include “security guarantees” from its allies so that Moscow is not able to launch future aggression.
The meeting in Alaska will be Trump and Putin’s first encounter since the invasion of Ukraine, the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II, and comes after the relationship between the two leaders has wavered.
In Trump’s first term, the president called Putin a strong and smart leader and said he “got along great” with him.
But after promising to solve the conflict within 24 hours during his presidential campaign, Trump has since extended that deadline and has expressed his frustration at the Russian president’s seeming unwillingness to end the war.
Trump had threatened to impose new sanctions and tariffs from Friday against Moscow and countries that buy its exports unless Putin agreed to end the conflict. It was unclear by Saturday morning whether those sanctions would take effect or be delayed or canceled.
Trump’s ultimatums have not prompted the Kremlin to move one inch on its war in Ukraine so far, other than to give the president a meeting.
Although Trump’s agreement to a meeting suggested a chance for progress, it was far from certain anything substantial would be achieved, Peter Watkins, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a London-based think tank, told NBC News Saturday.
“The underlying issues have not changed,” he said. “For Russia, this isn’t just about territory, it’s about controlling Ukraine as a whole.” He also noted that Trump would likely want to leave the summit with something to show for it, but the outcome might be only “another step” in a protracted process rather than a decisive deal.
Promises of talks between Trump and Putin have done little to quiet the violence on the ground since their announcement.
The last time Alaska hosted a high-stakes diplomatic gathering was in March 2021, when senior officials from the administration of Democratic former President Joe Biden met with top Chinese officials in Anchorage.
On the ground, the Kremlin’s larger army is slowly advancing deeper into Ukraine at great cost in troops while it relentlessly bombards Ukrainian cities.
Overnight, Russian drone strikes hit a minibus in a suburb of Kherson, killing two and leaving six injured, the region’s prosecutor’s office said Saturday.
Ukraine’s Air Force Command said Saturday that Russia launched 47 drone strikes overnight in multiple Ukrainian regions, with 31 of them making landfall.
The senior U.S. official and people briefed on the discussions said no visit has been finalized and that it’s unclear if Zelenskyy would ultimately be in Alaska for meetings.
The senior administration official said it is “absolutely” possible.
“Everyone is very hopeful that would happen,” the official said.
Asked whether the U.S. had officially invited Zelenskyy to Alaska, a senior White House official said: “The President remains open to a trilateral summit with both leaders. Right now, the White House is focusing on planning the bilateral meeting requested by President Putin.”
The Ukrainian government did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump announced Friday that he is meeting with Putin on Aug. 15 in Alaska as he tries to secure a ceasefire in Ukraine. The White House had made a Putin meeting with Zelenskyy a condition for a meeting between Trump and the Russian president to take place, but Trump later said that was not a precondition.
If Zelenskyy were to travel to Alaska, it is not clear if he and Putin would ever be in the same room, one of the people briefed on the discussions said.
The surge in diplomacy aimed at ending the war in Ukraine comes after Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff met with Putin in Moscow ahead of a deadline on Friday that the president had set for the Russian leader to agree to a ceasefire or face new sanctions.
Putin has not agreed to a ceasefire but proposed the outlines of an agreement to end the war that would allow Russia to keep large swaths of Ukrainian territory. Zelenskyy said defiantly on Saturday that Ukrainians “will not give their land to occupiers.”
Trump said Friday that between Russia and Ukraine, “there’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both.”
Administration officials were working on Saturday to try to gain support for a potential ceasefire from Ukrainian government and European leaders.
