Trump tells Ukraine: Accept Putin’s demands ‘or be destroyed’
US president, shouting and swearing, pressures Zelensky to surrender the Donetsk region
Kieran Kelly
Donald Trump demanded that Ukraine submit to Vladimir Putin’s peace terms or face destruction in an angry meeting at the White House last week, it has emerged.
The US president, who spoke with his Russian counterpart shortly before hosting Volodymyr Zelensky, warned that Putin would “destroy” Ukraine unless a peace deal was in place. Shouting and swearing, Mr Trump threw aside Ukrainian maps of the battlefield and
pressured Mr Zelensky to surrender the Donetsk region to Russia.
But he went on to deny the reports overnight and called for a ceasefire along the current front line.
Putin is demanding the withdrawal of Ukraine’s army from the crucial eastern territory as a precondition for peace.
However,
the surrender of Donetsk is a red line for Ukraine, which has long refused to cede the territory, which Russia has failed to capture despite fighting since 2014.
Kyiv still holds about a quarter of Donetsk province. The land makes up part of
the so-called “fortress belt”, a string of heavily defended towns that blocks Russia from making rapid westward advances towards the capital.
In the White House meeting,
Mr Trump echoed Putin’s talking points, despite them contradicting his own recent assessment that Moscow was a “paper tiger”, European officials briefed on the meeting told the Financial Times.
The US president told Mr Zelensky he was losing the war and said: “If [Putin] wants, he will destroy you.”
He was supported by Steve Witkoff, his envoy, who was among those most aggressively urging Ukraine to give up Donetsk, claiming that the region – as well as Luhansk – has a significant Russian-speaking population.
On his return to Washington on Sunday, Mr Trump told reporters on board Air Force One that the two sides “should just stop at the lines where they are, the battle lines”.
He denied that the meeting with Mr Zelensky descended into a shouting match, describing it as “cordial”.
“We think that what they should do is just stop at the lines where they are, the battle lines,” he said. “The rest is very tough to negotiate if you’re going to say, ‘you take this, we take that.’”
Asked if he had told the Ukrainian president that Kyiv must cede the entire Donbas region, Mr Trump said no. “Let it be cut the way it is. It’s cut up right now. I think 78 per cent of the land is already taken by Russia.”
“You leave it the way it is right now. They can...negotiate something later on down the line,” he added.
A source told Reuters that Mr Trump came up with the proposal after Mr Zelensky said during the meeting that he would not voluntarily cede any territory to Moscow.
Mr Trump is keen to secure another peace deal following the success of his intervention in
the war between Israel and Hamas.
In recent months, he has swung between Russian and Ukrainian positions, often cooling on sanctions or further military pressure on Moscow after phone calls with Putin. He told Mr Zelensky at the United Nations last month that Ukraine was in a position to win the war and dismissed Moscow as a “paper tiger” before his phone call with Putin on Oct 16.
At the White House, Mr Zelensky held his ground and refused to cut a deal that would leave Ukraine badly exposed. But the Ukrainian president left in a bitter mood, dashed in his hopes that Mr Trump would
authorise deliveries of long-range Tomahawk missiles.
On Saturday, Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said the visit “had not gone as Zelensky hoped”.
On Sunday, Mr Zelensky told NBC News that “I don’t know the dialogue between President [Trump] and Putin,” adding only that he believed Tomahawks could pressurise Moscow into serious peace negotiations. But JD Vance, the US vice-president, said Mr Trump was yet to make a decision about providing Tomahawks to Ukraine.
“The president right now is certainly hearing that request from the Ukrainians,” Mr Vance said, adding: “He has not yet made the decision to give Tomahawks to Ukraine.”
Asked whether Mr Trump needed to get tougher on Putin, following his decision to
turn the screws on Israel and Hamas, Mr Zelensky said: “Yes… because Putin is something similar but more strong than Hamas. It’s more bigger war and he is the second [largest] army in the world.”
He denied that Russia was winning the war and said that Putin was after more than just a further tranche of territory, in remarks that appeared to reflect his discussion with Mr Trump.
‘This is not about territory for Putin’
Russia’s “army now [is] in a weak position,” he said, with 1.3 million Russian servicemen reportedly killed or wounded and just 1 per cent of Ukrainian land captured since near the start of the war. “And really I don’t understand why the leader of the country which has the biggest territory in the world needs some more kilometres – that’s why I think that this war is not about the land and not about territory for him. It’s about our sovereignty and about our independence.”
Mr Trump is set to meet Putin in Budapest within the next fortnight in an attempt to make progress on a peace deal.
On Monday, Mr Zelensky said he was ready to join the meeting if invited. During their phone call, Putin told Mr Trump he was willing to cede small parts of the southern Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions under Russia’s control in exchange for the rest of the Donbas. Moscow has struggled to control the territory and made almost no progress on the southern frontline since 2022. A European diplomat told the Washington Post that Ukraine would never accept such a deal. “It’s like selling them [Russia] their own leg in exchange for nothing,” they said. On Sunday, Mr Zelensky said he told Mr Trump he was
ready and willing to attend the Budapest summit, but cast doubt on whether Putin was seriously prepared to make peace.
