US president’s statement comes as he plans to meet Vladimir Putin ‘very soon’
Donald Trump has said he will meet “very shortly” with Vladimir Putin to discuss the war in Ukraine, and said an end to the three-and-a-half-year war would have to involve “some swapping of territories”.
“I’ll be meeting very shortly with President Putin. It would have been sooner, but I guess there’s security arrangements that unfortunately people have to make,” Trump told reporters at the White House late on Friday.
The US president also said “there’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both” Ukraine and Russia and that the issue would be discussed soon but he gave no further details.
Bloomberg reported on Friday that the deal could cement some of Putin’s territorial gains in Ukraine, effectively freezing the battle lines in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. Putin has claimed four Ukrainian regions in their entirety, although much of their territory remains under Ukrainian control.
