Kyiv won't give up land, says Zelensky as US-Russia summit confirmed

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Kyiv, Ukraine | AFP

Ukraine won't surrender land to Russia to buy peace, President Volodymyr Zelensky warned Saturday, after Washington and Moscow agreed to hold a summit in a bid to end the war.

Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will meet in the US state of Alaska on August 15, to try to resolve the three-year conflict, despite warnings from Ukraine and Europe that Kyiv must be part of negotiations.

Announcing the summit on Friday, Trump said that "there'll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both" Ukraine and Russia, without providing further details.

"Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier," Zelensky said on social media hours later.

"Any decisions against us, any decisions without Ukraine, are also decisions against peace. They will achieve nothing," he said, adding that the war "cannot be ended without us, without Ukraine".

Zelensky also urged Ukraine's allies to take "clear steps" towards achieving a sustainable peace, during a call with Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

National security advisors from Kyiv's allies -- including the United States, EU nations and the UK -- were gathering in Britain on Saturday to align their views ahead of the Putin-Trump summit.

"It is truly important that the Russians do not succeed in deceiving anyone again," Zelensky said after a call with French President Emmanuel Macron, without elaborating further.

Three rounds of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine this year have failed to bear fruit, and it remains unclear whether a summit could bring peace any closer as the warring sides' positions are still far apart.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with millions forced to flee their homes.

Putin has resisted multiple calls from the United States, Europe and Kyiv for a ceasefire.

Zelensky said Kyiv was "ready for real decisions that can bring peace" but said it should be a "dignified peace", without giving details.

Putin, a former KGB officer in power in Russia for over 25 years, has ruled out holding talks with Zelensky at this stage.

Ukraine's leader has been pushing for a three-way summit and has frequently said meeting Putin is the only way to make progress towards peace.

Far away from war

The summit in Alaska, the far-north territory which Russia sold to the United States in 1867, would be the first between sitting US and Russian presidents since Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva in June 2021. This was just nine months before Moscow sent troops into Ukraine.

(FILES) Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) and US President Donald Trump shake hands before a meeting in Helsinki, on July 16, 2018. (AFP)

Zelensky said of the location that it is "very far away from this war, which is raging on our land, against our people".

The Kremlin said the choice was "logical" because the state close to the Arctic is on the border between the two countries, and this is where their "economic interests intersect".



Moscow has also invited Trump to pay a reciprocal visit to Russia later.

Trump and Putin last sat together in 2019 at a G20 summit meeting in Japan during Trump's first term. They have spoken by telephone several times since January.

On Friday, Putin held a round of calls with allies, including China and India, in a diplomatic flurry ahead of the summit with Trump, who has spent his first months in office trying to broker peace in Ukraine without making a breakthrough.

The US president has earlier imposed an additional tariff on India for buying Russia's oil in a bid to nudge Moscow into talks. He also threatened to impose a similar tax on China, but so far has refrained from doing so.

Fighting goes on

Away from the talks, across a more than 1,000-kilometre (600-mile) frontline, Russia and Ukraine continued pouring dozens of drones onto each other's positions in an exchange of attacks in the early hours of Saturday.

As a result of a Russian strike, a bus carrying civilians was hit in Ukraine's frontline city of Kherson, killing two people and wounding 16.

The Russian army claimed to have taken Yablonovka, another village in the Donetsk region, place of the most intense fighting in the east, and one of the five regions Putin sees as part of Russia.

Four people were killed as of Saturday morning in Donetsk after Russian shelling, Ukrainian authorities said.

In 2022, the Kremlin announced the annexation four Ukrainian regions -- Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson -- despite not having full control over them.

Russia had previously annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.

As a prerequisite to any peace settlement, Moscow demanded Kyiv to pull its forces out of the regions and commit to being a neutral state, shun Western military support and be excluded from joining NATO.

Kyiv said it will never recognise Russian control over its sovereign territory, though it acknowledged securing the return of land captured by Russia would have to come through diplomacy, not on the battlefield.