Vladimir Putin, who met Mr Trump in Alaska on August 15th, wants Ukraine to hand over unoccupied land in the eastern Donbas region, a proposal that Mr Trump seems to favour. Mr Trump has now embraced the Russian proposal to skip an initial ceasefire and go immediately to a final settlement,

Ukraine and its European allies have been buoyed by Trump's promise during a summit on Monday of security guarantees for Kyiv, but many questions remain unanswered. Officials told Reuters that the Pentagon is carrying out planning exercises on the support Washington could offer beyond providing weapons.

NATO defense chiefs held a “candid discussion" Wednesday about what security guarantees they could offer Kyiv to help forge a peace agreement that ends Russia’s three-year war on Ukraine, a senior alliance official said.

Trump said after his meeting in Alaska last week with Russian President Vladimir Putin that Putin was open to the idea of security guarantees for Ukraine. View on euronews

President Donald Trump on Tuesday offered his assurances that U.S. troops would not be sent to Ukraine to defend against Russia, after seeming to leave open the possibility the day before. Trump also said in a morning TV interview that Ukraine’s hopes of joining NATO and regaining the Crimean Peninsula are “impossible.

After meeting Donald Trump in Alaska on Friday, the president of Russia reiterated his position that the “root causes” of the conflict in Ukraine must be resolved. The phrase is understood to be shorthand for a series of maximalist demands aimed at addressing Russia’s diminished status since the collapse of the Soviet Union,