Trump to Host Zelenskyy, EU Leaders at White House Following ‘Successful’ Russia Summit

President Donald Trump was very successful in his negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, said Steve Witkoff, U.S. special envoy for peace missions. 

“It was absolutely acknowledged as a win,” said Witkoff on Fox News Sunday today. “We did what we were supposed to do better than what people estimated we would achieve.”

Trump supports a peace deal, and he got through almost all of it in Alaska, Witkoff noted. Trump and Putin agreed on things like “much more robust security guarantees” and “enshrining, legislatively, language that would prevent” the Russians from trying to take any more land from Ukraine after a peace deal.

While some critics, like The Wall Street Journal editorial board, say the summit may have just “ended [Putin’s] isolation from the West” and gave him “more time to continue bombing Ukrainian cities,” Witkoff says what the Trump administration achieved with this summit was “epic.”

“That’s just a flatout fact,” Witkoff said. “We moved the Russians significantly past where we thought they were going to end up.”

What people should be focusing on is the end result of “eliminating death on the battlefield in Ukraine and Russia,” which is much more attainable than before, Witkoff said. 

Now Trump is immediately moving on from the U.S.-Russia summit to host a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and over half a dozen key European leaders at the White House Monday. 

Witkoff said he expects part of Monday’s discussions to be about “the specifics of what the Ukrainians feel that they need” in order to provide them with a sense of security in the future.

“Hopefully we can narrow the issues down even further and get ourselves well along the way toward the codification of a peace deal,” Witkoff said.