In a private meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday, President Donald Trump urged him to concede a significant amount of territory to Russia or face destruction, a meeting that devolved into a “shouting match” with Trump “cursing all the time,” according to insiders who spoke with the Financial Times in its report Sunday.
“If [Putin] wants it, he will destroy you,” Trump reportedly told Zelenskyy in the closed-door meeting, according to who the Financial Times described as a “European official with knowledge of the meeting,” speaking with the outlet on the condition of anonymity.
According to the insiders who spoke with the Financial Times, Trump “threw Ukraine’s maps of the battlefield” during the tense meeting, urging Zelenskyy to surrender parts of the eastern Donbas region which still remain under Ukrainian control. The concession Trump proposed would be in exchange for Russia ceding small regions near the southern and southeastern Ukrainian cities of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, respectively – the former now under Ukrainian control and the latter under Russian control.
But for some Ukrainian officials, surrendering the Donbas region was a nonstarter.
“To give [the Donbas] to Russia without a fight is unacceptable for Ukrainian society, and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin knows that,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, who chairs the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, speaking with the Financial Times.
An unnamed official told the outlet that Zelenskyy was “very negative” following the meeting, while noting that European leaders were “not optimistic but pragmatic with planning next steps.”