Trump, European leaders have ‘very good call’ ahead of Alaska summit on Friday

European leaders said on Wednesday they had hammered out a strategy with US President Donald Trump for his scheduled meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia on Friday in Alaska to discuss ending the war in Ukraine.

The strategy also includes an insistence any peace plan must start with a cease-fire and not be negotiated without Ukraine at the table.

The trans-Atlantic discussions on Wednesday were a last-minute effort by European leaders to close ranks with Trump ahead of the Friday meeting.

They came in a video call arranged by Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany. It included Trump, Vice President JD Vance, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and several other European leaders with strong relationships with Trump, including Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy.

Zelensky traveled to Berlin for the meeting and briefed reporters afterward with Merz.

“We had a truly exceptionally constructive and good conversation” with Trump, Merz told reporters in brief remarks. “There is hope for movement, there is hope for peace in Ukraine.”

Trump is famously mercurial, including on the issue of Ukraine. At several points in recent weeks, European allies have believed they were succeeding in bringing him onboard with their strategies, only for him to warm to Putin’s overtures, as he did in agreeing to the hastily scheduled bilateral meeting.

After the meeting, Trump sound pleased with his allies.

“We had a very good call,” he told reporters after an event at the Kennedy Center in Washington. “I would rate it a 10. Very friendly.”

Trump said he would call Zelensky, then European leaders, after the Alaska meeting. If that meeting goes well, he said, he would like to meet soon after with Putin and Zelensky together. 

He said “there will be very severe consequences” for Russia if Putin does not agree to stop the war after the Friday meeting. Asked if he believed he could convince Putin on Friday to stop targeting Ukrainian civilians, Trump said no.

“I’ve had that conversation with him,” the US President said. “I’ve had a lot of good conversations with him, and then I go home and see a rocket hit a nursing home, or a rocket hit an apartment building and people are laying dead in the streets.”

Merz and Zelensky told reporters Trump had agreed to five principles for the talks with Putin. They include keeping Ukraine “at the table” for follow-up meetings on the war and refusing to discuss peace terms, like swaps of land between Russia and Ukraine, before a cease-fire is put in place.

They said that Ukraine would be willing to discuss changes in territory — including ceding some land to Russia, but that it would not discuss legally recognizing Russia’s occupation of parts of the country.

The principles also include insisting on security guarantees for Ukraine after the war — including retaining its right to potentially join NATO in the future — and a commitment to ramping up economic pressure on Russia if negotiations do not lead to an agreement.

Macron of France told reporters that the issue of territorial exchanges had been brought up during the call but that it remained vague and that only Ukraine could negotiate a land swap.

“As of today, there are no serious territorial exchange plans on the table,” he said.

Zelensky has not been invited to the Alaska meeting. He said on Wednesday that he had warned Trump and the European leaders that Putin was bluffing about his intentions in Anchorage.

“I told my colleagues, the American president, our colleague Putin does not want peace,” Zelensky said. “He wants to occupy us completely.”