Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday said he told President Donald Trump and European leaders that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is “bluffing” on pursuing peace as preparations for Friday’s U.S.-Russia summit in Alaska continue.
Speaking in Berlin after a virtual meeting with Trump and European officials, Zelenskyy said Putin “is trying to put pressure before the meeting in Alaska along all part of the Ukrainian front, Russia is trying to show that it can occupy all of Ukraine. Of course, this is their desire.”
“I told my colleagues, the U.S. president and our European friends, that Putin definitely does not want peace. He wants the occupation of our country. And we all really understand that. Putin will not be able to deceive anyone. We need further pressure for peace. Not only American, but also European sanctions,” Zelenskyy said.
“We talked about the meeting in Alaska,” Zelenskyy added. “We hope that the central topic of the meeting will be a ceasefire. An immediate ceasefire. The U.S. president has repeatedly said this. He suggested to me that after the meeting in Alaska we will have contact. And we will discuss all the results, if there are any. And we will determine the next mutual steps.”
The White House is preparing for a highly-anticipated meeting in Anchorage. President Trump’s summit with Putin will be “a listening exercise,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday.
A woman walks past a heavily damaged residential building following a Russian strike in the town of Bilozerske, Donetsk region of Ukraine, on August 12, 2025.
Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images
Leavitt told reporters that a face-to-face meeting will give Trump “the best indication of how to end this war and where this is headed.”
“I think this is a listening exercise for the president,” Leavitt said. “Only one party that’s involved in this war is going to be present. And so this is for the president to go and to get, again, a more firm and better understanding of how we can hopefully bring this war to an end.”
Though details of Friday’s meeting are still being ironed out, the pair are scheduled to meet at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, a White House official confirmed to ABC News. Leavitt said Tuesday it was “part of the plan” for Trump to meet one-on-one with Putin.
Zelenskyy is not expected to attend the event. On Wednesday, Zelenskyy pushed for a three-way meeting between Russia, Ukraine and the U.S.
“We must prepare a trilateral format for the conversation,” Zelenskyy said.
“As for our principles, as for our territorial integrity, in the end it is still decided at the level of leaders. It is impossible to solve this without Ukraine. And, by the way, everyone supports this,” Zelenskyy added.
European governments have expressed their support for Ukraine in any coming peace negotiations, urging Trump to facilitate European and Ukrainian involvement in any such discussions.
French President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday that Trump “was very clear on the fact that the what the United States wants is to obtain a ceasefire during this meeting in Alaska.”
“The second element that was very clearly expressed by President Trump is that the territorial matters from Ukraine can and will only be negotiated by the Ukrainian president,” Macron continued. “This is the position that we support, and it has been very clearly expressed by President Trump, and so this heralds our meetings in the future.”
In a statement posted to Telegram, Zelenskyy said the Ukrainian side had engaged in more than 30 “conversations and consultations with partners” regarding a potential peace settlement. “Different parts of the world, different visions, but common positions. We must end this war. We must put pressure on Russia for an honest peace.”
During a news conference in Moscow on Wednesday, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs deputy spokesperson Alexei Fadeev said Russia considers “the consultations requested by the Europeans as politically and practically insignificant.”
Fadeev also said Russia’s stance on ending the war in Ukraine has not changed since Putin laid out his conditions last year: the full withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from parts of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson that they still control, and Ukraine abandoning its plans to join the NATO alliance.
Fadeev told reporters that the upcoming meeting between Putin and Trump in Alaska will allow the two leaders to focus on discussing all current issues between their countries, from the Ukraine war to the normalization of relations.
In this pool photograph distributed by Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is pictured in Moscow on August 12, 2025.
Vyacheslav Prokofiev/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Meanwhile, long-range strikes by Russia and Ukraine continued overnight into Wednesday.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 49 drones and two North Korean-made ballistic missiles into the country overnight, of which 32 drones and both missiles were shot down or suppressed.
Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said its forces shot down 63 Ukrainian drones overnight.
Ukraine’s General Staff said the targets of the attacks included the Unecha oil pump station in Russia’s western Bryansk region. “An impact and a large-scale fire was recorded” in the area of the facility, the General Staff said in a statement.
ABC News’ Kelsey Walsh, Natalia Kushnir, Anna Sergeeva, Yulia Drozd, Hannah Demissie, Morgan Winsor and Joe Simonetti contributed to this report.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
