Trump pressed Zelensky to accept Russia’s peace terms 'or be destroyed': Report
US President Donald Trump has reportedly pressed his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, to accept Russia’s latest peace terms during a stormy White House meeting.
The exchange took place on Friday, The Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing officials familiar with the meeting.
The conversation, the sources said, would frequently escalate into shouting, with Trump “cursing all the time,” and brushing aside maps of the frontlines presented by the Ukrainian delegation.
‘If Putin wants, he’ll destroy you’
Trump is also said to have repeated several of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s key talking points from a conversation the two heads of state had held a day earlier.
One official said Trump told Zelensky he was losing the conflict and warned, “If [Putin] wants it, he will destroy you.”
He insisted that Zelensky surrender the entire eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas and emphasized that further stubbornness would only deepen Ukraine’s losses.
The report came on the same day as an interview between Trump and Fox News, in which he said “he was confident” about “ending” the conflict.
Commenting on the report, observers said, if true, the exchange between Trump and Zelensky could point to the United States’ considering revisiting its increasing arms support for the countries that border Russia. Washington has been historically lavishing deadly weapons on those states at the cost of further antagonizing Moscow.
Responding to Zelensky, Trump also reportedly turned down his request for long-range Tomahawk missiles, the daily added.
Putin warns Trump about Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine https://t.co/FuwfggVHw9
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According to one official, Trump, meanwhile, told Zelensky that Putin had described the conflict as a “special operation.”
The Russian president ordered the special military operation in 2014 to demilitarize Ukraine’s Donetsk and Lugansk regions, which together form Donbas.
The regions are largely populated by ethnic Russians, and have declared themselves new republics, refusing to recognize Kiev’s Western-backed government.
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