Trump hints at security guarantees for both Ukraine and Russia – Reuters

According to the sources, during the meeting with Zelenskyy, Trump refused to provide Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles but considered granting security guarantees to both sides, which puzzled the Ukrainian delegation.

After the meeting with Zelensky, Trump publicly called for a ceasefire along the current front lines, and the Ukrainian president supported this position in his comments to journalists. A source said that the US president made this proposal during the meeting after Zelenskyy stated that he would not give up any territory to Moscow.

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

The article notes that the White House chief emphasized this position in his comments to reporters on Sunday aboard Air Force One.

“We think that what they should do is just stop at the lines where they are, the battle lines,” he said, adding: “The rest is very tough to negotiate.”

As Reuters notes, in recent weeks, there have been signs that the US president is abandoning attempts to pressure Kyiv and Moscow into a deal, instead giving full support to the Ukrainians.

For example, after the meeting with Zelenskyy at the UN General Assembly in September, Trump suggested that Ukraine could regain all the lost territories.

However, the outlet writes, Friday’s meeting indicates that Trump may again be pushing for a rapid deal, even if its terms would be unacceptable to Kyiv.

American officials have repeatedly raised the issue of a possible land swap between Ukraine and Russia—an idea Trump supported earlier this year—and during Friday’s meeting, the US president said that reaching a deal quickly is extremely important, sources said.

“It was pretty bad,” one of the sources said of the meeting.

“The message was, 'Your country will freeze, and your country will be destroyed'" if Ukraine doesn't make a deal with Russia.”

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

Both sources said Trump used profanity several times.

Two sources shared the impression that Trump was influenced by his Thursday conversation with Russian president Vladimir Putin. During that call, according to The Washington Post, Putin proposed a territorial exchange in which Ukraine would give up the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in return for small parts of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.

One of the sources said that US officials made that same territorial exchange proposal to Zelenskyy on Friday.

The Ukrainians see great strategic value in the parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions they control and believe that giving up those territories would make the rest of Ukraine much more vulnerable to Russian offensive operations, said a source familiar with the course of the meeting.

That source stated that giving up the western part of Donetsk and Luhansk would be equivalent to “suicide.”

Meanwhile, two sources said that US President’s special envoy Steve Witkoff was among those who most aggressively urged the Ukrainians to agree to Russia’s exchange proposal.

Witkoff noted that there is a significant Russian-speaking population living in Donetsk and Luhansk, one of the sources said, and he had previously expressed this view publicly.

Zelenskyy’s meeting with Trump on October 17

On Friday, Trump and Zelenskyy met in Washington. Ukraine failed to secure US approval on its key request—to obtain Tomahawk missiles.

The US president said that while Washington has many Tomahawks, the missiles are still needed by the United States itself, and the country cannot risk its security by giving this weapon to Kyiv.

After the meeting, Zelenskyy suggested that Trump’s decision regarding the Tomahawks may have been influenced by his conversation with Putin, which took place before the summit.

On Sunday, US Vice President JD Vance said that the decision on providing Tomahawks to Ukraine remains open.