Vladimir Putin on June 4 flatly rejected the idea of European leaders playing any role in Ukraine peace negotiations. His reasoning: you can’t supply weapons to one side of a conflict and then claim to be a neutral referee.
Instead, Putin pointed to a set of compromises he says were discussed with Donald Trump during their August 2025 summit in Anchorage, Alaska. In his telling, those talks already produced a workable framework, and Ukraine just needs to agree to it.
Europe told to sit this one out
“How can the European Union or individual EU countries serve as mediators when they are directly assisting the country with which we are in an armed conflict?”
The Anchorage framework
