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China said it hopes all those with a stake in the Russia-Ukraine war would play a role in the peace negotiations, as U.S. President Donald Trump prepares for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday.

Why It Matters

China is a vital strategic partner of Russia’s and, as the dominant and larger partner, holds influence over Moscow’s decision-making.

While China has said it plays no role in Russia’s war in Ukraine, Beijing has provided Russia with a major economic lifeline through large-scale oil purchases, helping Moscow to circumvent Western sanctions.

What To Know

The Trump-Putin summit will discuss the control of land in Ukraine, swathes of which Russia has seized during the course of its full-scale invasion, launched in February 2022. Trump is trying to broker an end to the war.

Kyiv and its European allies have urged Trump not to agree to any concessions of Ukrainian land to Russia, saying such decisions are Ukraine’s alone to make, and warned against what they said is rewarding Moscow’s illegal aggression.

At a daily press briefing on Tuesday, August 12, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian was asked about Trump and Putin’s decision to hold a summit without inviting any representatives from Ukraine or the European Union.

“China supports all efforts conducive to the peaceful settlement of the crisis, and is glad to see Russia and the U.S. keep in contact, improve their relations and advance the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis,” Lin said.

“We hope all parties concerned and stakeholders will take part in the negotiation process in due course and reach a fair, lasting and binding peace agreement acceptable to parties concerned at an early date.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on May 9, 2025. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on May 9, 2025. Contributor/Getty Images

Russia said it invaded Ukraine to defend its national security, citing Kyiv’s ambitions to join the NATO alliance, and to protect the rights of ethnic Russians that it said were facing persecution.

Kyiv and its Western allies accuse Russia of an imperial war of conquest that has sought to take control of Ukraine by force so it can eradicate Ukrainian sovereignty and wipe out its national identity and culture.

With the exception of Hungary, EU leaders issued a joint statement on Tuesday appealing to Trump not to make any decisions without Ukraine, or outside of a ceasefire, and to take into consideration the potential impact on European security.

“A just and lasting peace that brings stability and security must respect international law, including the principles of independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and that international borders must not be changed by force,” the statement said.

“The people of Ukraine must have the freedom to decide their future. The path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine. Meaningful negotiations can only take place in the context of a ceasefire or reduction of hostilities.”

Russia controls about a fifth of Ukrainian territory, concentrated in the east, and much of it captured since February 2022. European allies fear Russia has broader goals and, unless it feels more pressure, could try to peel off land elsewhere on the continent.

What People Are Saying

The joint EU statement said: “Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has wider implications for European and international security. We share the conviction that a diplomatic solution must protect Ukraine’s and Europe’s vital security interests.”

President Donald Trump said on Monday: “There’ll be some land swapping going on,” adding that this would involve “some bad stuff for both” Russia and Ukraine.

What Happens Next

The Trump-Putin summit in Alaska takes place on Friday. Meanwhile, fighting continues along the front lines between Russia and Ukraine.

Update 8/12/25, 9:12 a.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.

“He wasn’t part of it,” Trump told reporters.

“I would say he could go, but he’s gone to a lot of meetings; he’s been there for three and a half years, and nothing happened.”

As Washington seeks a path to end the war in Ukraine, the upcoming meeting between Trump and Putin will mark their first face-to-face talks since the start of Trump’s second term.

Trump said after his meeting with Putin, a meeting between the Ukrainian and Russian leaders should take place.

“Ultimately, I’m going to put the two of them (Putin and Zelensky) in a room, I’ll be there or I won’t be there, and I think it’ll get solved,” Trump added.

During the press conference, Trump added that he was “a little bothered” by Zelensky’s words regarding “constitutional approval” for land swaps as part of a potential peace agreement.

“He’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap? There’ll be some land swapping going on,” Trump said.

“We’re going to change the battle lines. Russia has occupied a big portion of Ukraine. They’ve occupied some very prime territory. We’re going to try and get some of that territory back for Ukraine,” he added.

Trump described the upcoming meeting with Putin as a “feel-out meeting” and added that the Russian president wants “to get involved” and “to get over” the war.

“At the end of that meeting, probably in the first two minutes, I’ll know exactly whether or not a deal can be made,” Trump noted.

Trump had announced a summit with Putin and reportedly told Ukraine and European leaders that the Kremlin is open to negotiations if “land swaps” are part of the deal.

Though it remains unclear what such a deal would entail, a source in Ukraine’s Presidential Office told the Kyiv Independent that Moscow seeks Kyiv’s full withdrawal from partially occupied Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in the east while offering to withdraw its forces from the limited areas it holds in the northeastern Sumy and Kharkiv oblasts.

Publicly, Putin has demanded a ban on Ukraine’s NATO membership and a full Ukrainian withdrawal from partially occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts as a precondition for peace talks.

In turn, Zelensky has rejected ceding territory to Russia and urged a ceasefire as the first step toward peace talks, a position backed by Kyiv’s European partners.

Zelensky is also expected to hold talks with European leaders and Trump two days before the summit in Alaska.

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are set to meet in Alaska on Friday (August 15). Trump has repeatedly focussed on Moscow and Kyiv ‘swapping land’ as way to end the Ukraine war. But what does this mean exactly? What do we know about the plan?

(File) US President Donald Trump has repeatedly focussed on “land swapping” as a way to end the Ukraine war.. AFP

US President Donald Trump has reiterated that he will offer Russian President Vladimir Putin a land swap to end the Ukraine War.

Trump and Putin are set to meet in Alaska on Friday (August 15) in a development some Russian nationalists have hailed. Russia famously sold the territory to the United States for $7.2 million in 1867.

Trump is said to have been invited to a follow up meeting in Russia. The US president repeatedly focussed on “land swapping” as a way to end the Ukraine war.

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The development comes in the backdrop of German leader Friedrich Merz set to hold a virtual summit for Trump, US Vice President JD Vance, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders.

But what did Trump say? What do we know about the plan?

Let’s take a closer look:

What did Trump say?

Trump said the United States would try and get Ukraine some of its land back.

“Russia’s occupied a big portion of Ukraine. They occupied prime territory. We’re going to try to get some of that territory back for Ukraine,” he said at the White House.

Trump, not for the first time, said there would be “some swapping, changes in land”.

Trump said he would let European leaders know if Putin offers a fair deal. He said he would reach out to Zelenskyy first “out of respect”.

“I’m not going to make a deal. It’s not up to me to make a deal,” Trump said. “If it’s a fair deal, I will reveal it to the European Union leaders and to the NATO leaders and also to President Zelenskyy,” Trump said. “I may say, ‘lots of luck, keep fighting,’ or I may say we can make a deal.”

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Trump said he would be able to tell within two minutes if Putin was serious. “I believe [Putin] wants to get it over,” Trump said. “Now, I’ve said that a few times, and I’ve been disappointed.” Trump has threatened to impose sanctions on Russia if it refuses to end the Ukraine War.

He also described it as a ‘feeling out’ meeting – alluding to the fact that the two men would likely meet again in Russia, with Zelenskyy possibly even joining them. “I will put the two of them in a room,” he said. “I think it will get solved.”

Trump reiterated the claim that the war would have never happened if he had been president. “I’m going in to speak to Vladimir Putin, and I’m going to be telling him, ‘you’ve got to end this war. You’ve got to end it,’” Trump said. “He wasn’t going to mess with me. This war would have never happened.”

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US President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s meeting in the Oval Office of the White House was widely seen as an ambush. File image/AFP

Trump said that while he and Zelenskyy “get along”, he “very severely disagrees with what [the Ukrainian president] has done”. Trump said he was a little bothered by the fact that Zelenskyy said he had no authority to cede any of Ukraine’s territory to Russia.

“He’s got approval to go into a war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap? Because there’ll be some landswapping going on. I know that through Russia and through conversations with everybody,” Trump said.

“It’s very complex, because you have lines that are very uneven,” Trump said. “There will be some swapping. There will be some changes in land, and the word that they will use is, they make changes. We’re going to change the lines, the battlelines.”

Trump last week said “some swapping of territories” would occur. “We’re looking at swapping. We’re going to get some back,” he said.

Zelenskyy on social media the next day said there would be no handing over of territory to Russia.

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“The answer to the Ukrainian territorial question already is in the Constitution of Ukraine. No one will deviate from this—and no one will be able to. Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupier,” he wrote.

Trump has repeatedly blamed Zelenskyy, with whom he had a disastrous meeting in the Oval Office earlier this year, for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russia currently holds around a fifth of Ukraine. This includes the entire Luhansk, a lot of Donetsk, large chunks of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia and small tiny parts of the Kharkiv and northern Sumy.

US Vice President J Dance, who was also present at the meeting, accused Zelenskyy of not being sufficiently grateful to the US. The meeting, which was held in front of the press, was widely seen as an ambush.

What do we know about the plan?

The White House is reportedly trying to convince European leaders to accept Russia taking over the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine. Russia also wants to keep Crimea, which it invaded in 2014 under the US President Barack Obama.

There are reports that Russia will give up its claim to Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, areas which it has partially occupied. There are reports that Putin had proposed this deal to Trump envoy Steve Witkoff during their meeting last week.

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Moscow essentially wants to tighten its grip over Donetsk and Luhansk – the industrial heartland of Ukraine and a region rich in resources. There are also reports that Ukraine under such a proposal would leave Donetsk and Russia would halt its advances in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

This would essentially allow Putin to declare victory. Ukraine, under such a deal, would gain precisely nothing as it has never lay claim to any of Russia’s territories.

European leaders of the weekend have already pushed back against such a deal. They released a joint statement insisting that Ukraine must be a part of any peace talks.

The deal the White House is pushing would essentially allow Russian President Vladimir Putin to declare victory.

“The path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine. We remain committed to the principle that international borders must not be changed by force. The current line of contact should be the starting point of negotiations”, the leaders of France, Germany, Poland, UK, Italy, Finland and the European Commission said in the joint statement.

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Putin, an ex-KGB agent, has made no secret of the fact that he wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union. He previously called the fall of the empire the greatest tragedy of the 20th Century.

Experts say Ukraine will likely not go along with any deal reached by Putin and Trump. As Kaja Kallas, vice-president of the European Commission, told the BBC, “If Ukraine is not part of the deal, any deal will just not be implemented and that is the reason why Ukraine needs to be around that table”.

Kallas said she hopes Zelensky will be invited to the meeting. She added that Putin is playing the long game. Kallas said Putin wants to “go for the old fashioned way of…let’s divide the territories and spheres of influence”.

Interestingly, Trump has also mused about reaching a similar grand bargain with Russia and China – dividing up the world into their relative spheres of influence and vowing not to interfere or encroach on each other’s regions.

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Peter Watkins, an associate fellow at Chatham House, a London-based think tank, told NBC News he is sceptical that anything will be achieved.

“The underlying issues have not changed,” he said. “For Russia, this isn’t just about territory. It’s about controlling Ukraine as a whole.”

He said that while Trump would like to get something out of the talks, it is likely to be just a small step forward rather than an agreement.

The Trump administration has previously said that Ukraine’s goal of getting back its land from Russia is unrealistic.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “We must start by recognising that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering”. Zelenskyy has described any deal that does not involve Ukraine as a ‘dead’ one.

With inputs from agencies

US President Donald Trump said on Monday that he plans to discuss “land swapping” between Russia and Ukraine at a summit with Vladimir Putin on Friday and hinted that both countries would need to make territorial concessions to end the war.

Speaking about his upcoming meeting with the Russian leader at a White House press conference, Trump said any peace settlement would involve “changes in land” — including “some bad stuff for both” countries — but also suggested he would try to persuade Putin to abandon Russia’s claims to at least part of the Ukrainian territory it currently occupies.

“Russia’s occupied a big portion of Ukraine,” Trump said. “They’ve occupied some very prime territory. We’re going to try and get some of that territory back for Ukraine”.

It is unclear which areas Trump foresees Russia ceding to Ukraine, as Ukrainian forces no longer hold any significant Russian territory after losing their foothold in the Kursk region in April. Russia, meanwhile, currently controls some 20% of Ukraine.

Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rejected Trump’s suggestion that Kyiv could cede some of its territory to Moscow as part of a deal to end the war, stressing that Ukraine’s constitution prohibits him from changing the country’s borders.

On Monday, Trump said he was “a little bothered” by Zelensky’s refusal to consider territorial concessions and his insistence that any exchanges of land with Russia would require a national referendum.

“He [Zelensky] has got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap. Because there’ll be some land swapping going on,” Trump said.

Meanwhile, an unnamed Western official told The Telegraph on Monday that Zelensky could agree to cede territory already held by Russia — namely, freezing the frontline where it is — in exchange for weapons deliveries and a path to NATO membership.

While Zelensky is not expected to attend Friday’s Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska, the US president said he would speak with his Ukrainian counterpart “out of respect” immediately afterwards, before briefing other European leaders.

Trump added that, following his initial “feel-out” meeting with Putin on Friday, he would aim to organise a direct summit between Putin and Zelensky.

Zelensky, who warned over the weekend that Putin would try to “deceive” Trump, said on Monday that the Russian leader was “definitely not preparing for a ceasefire or an end to the war”.

“There is no indication whatsoever that the Russians have received signals to prepare for a post-war situation,” Zelensky said in his nightly address to Ukrainians. “On the contrary, they are redeploying their troops and forces in ways that suggest preparations for new offensive operations”.

Donald Trump has said that he will discuss “land swapping” with Russian president Vladimir Putin during their high-stakes summit in Alaska on Friday.

The two world leaders will meet in the US state at the end of this week to discuss a potential deal to end to the three-year-old war between Russia and Ukraine.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Trump said there would “be some land swapping going on,” adding that this would involve “some bad stuff” for both countries.

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Trump also expressed frustration with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s insistence that Kyiv would need to hold a national referendum on any peace deal which grants Russia control over territory it has illegally occupied since the start of its invasion in 2022.

Trump and Putin last met in 2018 in Helsinki, Finland (AP)

“I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelensky was saying I have to get constitutional approval,” Trump said. “He has approval to go to war and kill everybody but he needs approval to do a land swap. Because there will be some land swapping going on. I know that through Russia and through conversations with everybody.”

Zelensky has remained firm that Ukraine won’t commit to giving up land in order to secure a ceasefire, despite Russia’s control over four of the country’s regions.

Trump caused alarm when he told reporters he was “going to Russia on Friday,” despite the meeting taking place in Alaska, a region which was colonised by Russia until Czar Alexander II sold it to the US in 1867.

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The US president has said that the meeting with the Russian leader is “a feel-out meeting”, adding that he was open to meeting with Putin first and then with Zelensky, or meeting both together. However, he did not say he would push for a three-person meeting.

Zelensky has expressed concerns about the prospect of ceding land to Russia (PA Wire)

“President Putin invited me to get involved,” he said, adding he felt it was very respectful for Putin to come to Alaska instead of asking Trump to go to Russia.

European Union leaders shared a statement of support for Ukraine on Tuesday, appealing for Trump to defend their security interests during the summit.

The statement from 26 nations welcomed the “efforts of President Trump towards ending Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine” but stressed that “the path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine.”

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“A just and lasting peace that brings stability and security must respect international law, including the principles of independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and that international borders must not be changed by force,” they said.

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban did not support the statement, later writing on social media: “The statement attempts to set conditions for a meeting to which leaders of the EU were not invited.

“The fact that the EU was left on the sidelines is sad enough as it is. The only thing that could make things worse is if we started providing instructions from the bench”, he added, before concluding: “The only sensible action for EU leaders is to initiate an EU-Russia summit, based on the example of the US-Russia meeting. Let’s give peace a chance!”