(Anchorage) Donald Trump assured Thursday that Vladimir Putin “would not be clever” against him on Friday in Alaska, and repeated that his goal was to involve Volodymyr Zelensky, if possible “very quickly”, in future peace talks.
What to know
- US President Donald Trump will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin “headache” on Friday;
- The American president assured that only a tripartite summit also including Volodymyr Zelensky could seal a peace agreement in Ukraine, but repeated that it would be necessary to “share” territories;
- Donald Trump assured that Russia would face “very serious consequences” if it did not agree to end the war;
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was received on Thursday in London by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer;
- Responding to a strong Russian military thrust, Ukraine has drawn dozens of drones inside Russian territory, launching a refinery and making three injured;
- Kyiv and Moscow exchanged on Thursday 84 prisoners from each camp.
As this summit approaches, Ukraine faces ever stronger military pressure, and ordered new family evacuations on Thursday in an area in the Donetsk region (east), the Russian army having advanced quickly in recent days.
“If I was not president, [le dirigeant russe] would like to take all of Ukraine. But I am president and he will not be clever with me, “said the American president in an exchange with the press Thursday at the White House, on the eve of his tête-à-tête with Vladimir Putin.
For Daniel Fried, a former United States Ambassador to Poland, now an expert in Atlantic Council, the great danger on Friday is that of a “missed opportunity, if Putin garnered the victory represented by the simple outfit of this summit, plays the watch and wasts everyone. »»
“I will know from both, three, four or five first minutes if it will be a good meeting or a bad meeting,” said Donald Trump, who dreams of the future winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
“This meeting will open the way to another,” including the Ukrainian president, he said a few hours earlier on Fox News radio.
Kyiv and Europeans fear that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, in the absence of Volodymyr Zelensky, do not undertake on Friday to redraw the map of Ukraine.
“Givenant”
“I don’t want to use the term” sharing things “, but in a way, it’s not a bad term. There will be give-back with regard to borders, territories, ”also said Donald Trump.
He has already advanced the possibility of holding a future tripartite summit in “remaining in Alaska”.
Vladimir Putin praised him on Thursday the “fairly energetic and sincere efforts” of the United States “to put an end to hostilities, get out of the crisis and achieve agreements that satisfy all the parties involved”.
The Ukrainian president was not invited to this interview between two leaders with a very particular relationship, alternating pushes of tension and spectacular rapprochements.
Volodymyr Zelensky was however warmly received in London on Thursday by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
European leaders are blocking around him and trying to weigh on Donald Trump.
His conversation with Vladimir Putin on the basis of Elmendorf-Richardson, head-to-head with only performers, will also focus on “bilateral cooperation”, said Diplomatic Advisor to Kremlin, Iouri Ouchakov.
Donald Trump, a former real estate developer, often praises the economic potential of a normalized relationship with Russia.
Press conference
The meeting must start on Friday around 3:30 p.m. (eastern time), said the Kremlin.
The Russian and American presidents will then give a press conference, the first since their common appearance in front of the cameras in 2018 in Helsinki, which remained in the memories as a moment of connivance.
On the ground, the less numerous Ukrainian troops face a rapid advance in the Russian army on the front in the eastern region of Donetsk, where Moscow claimed on Thursday taking two new villages.
Ukraine pulled dozens of drones in the night from Wednesday to Thursday.
The official positions of the two belligerents are always irreconcilable.
Russia claims that Ukraine gives him four partially occupied regions (Donetsk, Louhansk, Zaporijjia and Kherson), in addition to the Crimea annexed in 2014, and that it renounces Western arms deliveries and any membership in NATO.
Capture of the Governor screen of the Belgorod region, supplied by Reuters
A car burns following an attack by a Ukrainian drone in Belgorod, Russia, on August 4, 2025, in this image taken from a video.
For Kyiv, these requirements are unacceptable.
During the three sessions of talks since the spring, the last of which was held in Istanbul in July, Russians and Ukrainians had only managed to agree on the exchange of prisoners of war.
In this context, Kyiv and Moscow announced on Thursday that they exchanged 84 prisoners from each camp.
A woman killed in a Ukrainian drone strike
A Ukrainian drone strike killed a woman in a residential building in the Russian city of Koursk on the night of Thursday to Friday, a few hours before the summit between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, said the governor of this border region.
“An enemy drone attacked a building in the night” in a district of Koursk, whose upper floors caught fire, wrote the governor of the region of the same name Alexandre Khinshtein on Telegram.
A 45-year-old woman died while 10 people were injured, including a teenager born in 2010, he said, adding that several neighboring buildings as well as a school had been damaged.
The Koursk region had been the target in the summer of 2024 of an offensive of the Ukrainian forces, who had seized more than a thousand square kilometers of Russian territory, before being definitively hunted in April 2025.
Since Russia launched its large -scale military offensive against Ukraine in February 2022, Kyiv responded with drone strikes on Russian infrastructure located hundreds of kilometers from its border.
This new attack comes a few hours from the summit between the presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump on Friday in the American state of Alaska.
As this meeting is approaching, Ukraine faces ever stronger military pressure. She ordered new family evacuations on Thursday in an area in the Donetsk region (East), the Russian army having advanced quickly in recent days.
Agency France-Presse
