Proposed Ukraine land concessions are Putin’s trap, EU’s top diplomat tells

The EU’s top diplomat has cautioned against pressuring Ukraine to cede territory to Russia in exchange for a future peace agreement. Kaja Kallas warned that allowing Russia to retain Ukrainian lands was a “trap that Putin wants us to walk into” in her first UK interview since EU leaders joined Donald Trump’s White House peace talks with Ukraine. Russia has long disputed the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, and throughout the previous ten years, 1.5 million Ukrainians have been forced to evacuate due to military aggression.

Ukraine has consistently rejected conceding Donbas to the Kremlin in exchange for peace, though Trump stressed the need for “swapping of territories”.

The Kremlin’s “wanted list” includes Kallas, who also talked extensively about “credible and robust” security guarantees for Ukraine. She acknowledged that at this point in the negotiations, there weren’t many “concrete steps” for a deterrent force. “The strongest security guarantee is a strong Ukraine army,” she said, outlining the importance of establishing guarantees that were “not just on paper”.

She stated that it was unclear at this time what role such forces would play and that it was up to the member states of the “coalition of the willing” to decide exactly what they could offer.

Days after Trump welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin at a military facility in Alaska, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met with leaders from important EU nations, including France, Germany, Italy, and Finland, at the White House last week. Kallas claimed that Putin received “everything he wanted” at the meeting in Alaska, which would affect his desire to engage in peace talks.

“He got such a welcoming and he wanted sanctions not to be put in place, which he also achieved.

“Putin is just laughing, not stopping the killing but increasing the killing,” Kallas said. “We are forgetting that Russia has not made one single concession.”

She added that the EU had put together the 19th package of sanctions to pressure the Russian leader into further discussions.

Meanwhile, Trump on Thursday set a two-week time frame for evaluating peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.

“I would say within two weeks we’re going to know one way or the other,” he said in a telephone interview with Todd Starnes, a host for right-wing media outlet Newsmax.

“After that, we’ll have to maybe take a different tack,” Trump said. Zelensky, however, questioned Putin’s willingness to meet with him.

According to a news agency, Zelensky charged Russia with evading the “necessity” of arranging a meeting between the leaders of the two nations in remarks made public to reporters on Thursday.

“Current signals from Russia are, to be honest, indecent. They’re trying to avoid the necessity to meet. They don’t want to end this war.” He also put pressure on Western allies, saying Ukraine would like to “have an understanding of the security guarantees architecture within seven to 10 days”. “We need to understand which country will be ready to do what at each specific moment,” he added.

Zelensky criticized Russia’s massive airstrike early Thursday, claiming it was acting as though there were no international attempts to halt the conflict. At least one person was killed and over a dozen others were injured in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, which is near the Polish border, as well as eleven other locations.

Earlier, some European leaders expressed similar opinions to those of the EU and Ukraine on Putin’s resistance to a peace agreement. “Rarely to be trusted” is how Finnish President Alexander Stubb described Putin, and he expressed doubt that Putin would eventually consent to a bilateral meeting with Zelensky.