UKRAINIAN President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet on Monday in Washington with US President Donald Trump, who has shifted to saying an overall peace agreement — and not a ceasefire — is the next step in ending the 3 1/2-year-old war. Trump’s abrupt reversal, aligning himself with a position held by Russian President Vladimir Putin, came in a social media post on Saturday, hours after they concluded a summit in Alaska that produced no agreement to halt the fighting. Putin has long said that Moscow is not interested in a temporary truce, and instead is seeking a long-term settlement that takes the Kremlin’s interests into account.

 

After calls with Zelenskyy and European leaders, Trump posted that “it was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up.” In a statement after the Trump call, the European leaders did not address whether a peace deal was preferable to a ceasefire, saying they “welcomed President Trump’s efforts to stop the killing in Ukraine, end Russia’s war of aggression, and achieve just and lasting peace.”

 

Trump and Ukraine’s European allies had been calling for a ceasefire. Trump’s statement that a peace agreement should be reached before a ceasefire appears to indicate Trump’s thinking is “shifting towards Putin,” an approach that would allow Moscow to keep fighting while negotiating, said Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. Zelenskyy, who was not invited to Alaska for the summit, said he had a “long and substantive” conversation with Trump early Saturday. He said they would “discuss all of the details regarding ending the killing and the war” on Monday. It will be Zelenskyy’s first visit to the US since Trump berated him publicly for being “disrespectful” during an extraordinary Oval Office meeting on February 28. Zelenskyy reiterated the importance of involving European leaders, who also were not at the summit.

 

“It is important that Europeans are involved at every stage to ensure reliable security guarantees together with America,” he said. “We also discussed positive signals from the American side regarding participation in guaranteeing Ukraine’s security.” Zelenskyy previously has said that European partners put on hold a proposal to establish a foreign troop presence in Ukraine to deter Russian aggression because it lacked an American backstop.