Shouting Summit 2” at the White House and yet another major U‑turn by Donald Trump on the war in Ukraine: The British newspaper "Financial Times" on Sunday revealed dramatic details of last weekend’s summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. According to the report, Trump pressed Zelensky to accept Russian President Vladimir Putin’s terms for ending the war — terms that essentially amount to Ukrainian surrender and include a full withdrawal from the territories still held by Kyiv in the Donbas region. Trump, the report alleges, warned Zelensky that if he did not sign a deal he would face “destruction."
Sources quoted by the Financial Times — European officials privy to the details — say that the meeting, held on Friday at the White House, repeatedly descended into a “shouting match,” with Trump reportedly “cursing all the time."
4 View gallery
US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky meet at the White House
(Photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
They added that Trump sounded as though he had adopted the Kremlin’s narrative, repeating to Zelensky messages that Putin himself had given him a day earlier in a phone call. He warned Zelensky that Ukraine was losing the war, and told him, according to those sources: “If he (Putin) wants, he will destroy you.”
According to the report, Trump also rejected Kyiv’s demand for advanced Tomahawk cruise missiles — the weapon Zelensky had hoped would increase pressure on Putin to agree to a ceasefire on terms more favorable to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Reuters published a similar account of the fraught meeting, noting that Trump even “floated” the possibility of offering security guarantees to both Kyiv and Moscow — a move that Ukrainian officials say left them bewildered.
Trump, ever since his return to the White House, has repeatedly changed his stance on the Russia‑Ukraine war — a war which he pledged during his campaign to end within 24 hours, but which he later admitted he failed to accomplish, calling it his most difficult foreign‑policy challenge.
4 View gallery
Zelensky smiles at the camera during a meeting with Trump; 'He came out very negative'
(Photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
From his first days back in office, Trump seemed to adopt the Russian narrative of the war; in his first meeting with Zelensky at the White House in February he publicly rebuked the Ukrainian leader on camera for allegedly failing to show enough gratitude to the U.S. for its assistance, arguing that Ukraine “has no cards” in the conflict — and that Zelensky was “gambling with World War III.”
That earlier public confrontation — dubbed the “summit of shouting” — shocked the world and ended with Zelensky being ushered out of the White House. But after a short crisis in which Trump suspended military aid to Kyiv, the two leaders patched things up and met several times. In recent months Trump expressed frustration that Putin was rejecting Trump’s initiative for an immediate ceasefire along current front‑lines — an initiative Zelensky had adopted — and in July he even threatened heavy tariffs on Russia, issuing Putin a clear ultimatum.
However, at the last minute, Putin managed to stall the ultimatum by offering to meet with Trump in Alaska — where, again, he deferred any agreement to end the war while Russian forces continued to capture additional territory at a slow pace and heavy cost.
4 View gallery
Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump meet at a summit in Alaska
(Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
After the Alaska summit in August, Trump once more voiced disappointment with Putin’s conduct; then in September, in what global media described as a sharp change of direction, he began speaking harshly about Russia: calling for its aircraft to be shot down if they entered European airspace, calling it a “paper tiger”, and expressing confidence that Ukraine could reclaim all the territories lost to it.
Against the backdrop of the ceasefire in the Gaza war, Trump in recent days once again has thrown his full weight into efforts to end the raging war in eastern Europe that now marks more than three‑and‑a‑half years of conflict, and said that without an agreement he was considering supplying Kyiv with Tomahawk missiles. The delivery of these missiles was expected to be the central issue at the summit with Zelensky.
But the day before, Putin again talked to Trump and secured a follow‑up summit in Hungary and apparently changed Trump’s mind: according to the Kremlin, Putin warned Trump that the transfer of the missiles would not have a dramatic battlefield effect but would damage the U.S.–Russia relationship.
Trump signaled his decision not to transfer the missiles in the public portion of the meeting with Zelensky when he said the U.S. needed them for itself. According to the report, in the closed session Trump repeated the same messages that Putin had given him — messages that contradicted the recent statements by Trump about Russia’s weakness. One source who spoke to the Financial Times said Trump told Zelensky that Putin had told him the conflict was “a special operation, not even a war." Putin still insists on calling the 2022 invasion a “special military operation."
4 View gallery
Ukrainian army fighting in the Donbass region in the east of the country, in the war against Russia
(Photo: Press service of the 24th Mechanized Brigade of Ukrainian Armed Forces/AFP)
The source added that at one point Trump threw aside maps of the frontline in Ukraine, saying “I’m tired of looking at them again and again. That red line —I don’t even know where it is. I’ve never been there.” He added that Russia’s economy was “in wonderful shape” — a remark that again contradicted his own earlier claims that Russia’s economy “is about to collapse."
According to the report, Trump demanded that Zelensky accept Putin’s peace terms. The Financial Times noted that, in a Thursday phone call with Trump, Putin offered a new ceasefire proposal — in which he would relinquish relatively small territories in southern Ukraine’s Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in exchange for Kyiv yielding all the territory it still held in the Donbas region (comprising Luhansk — now fully under Russian control — and some 30% of Donetsk province).
The FT observed that Putin’s new proposal represented only a modest concession compared with the one he made at the Alaska summit — when he demanded the entire Donbas region in return for a ceasefire along existing control‑lines without any Russian withdrawal from Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. The newspaper noted that Ukraine rejected the new proposal out of hand, citing concern that withdrawal from the strategic territory in Donetsk — what Kyiv calls its “fortress belt” — would pave the way for further Russian offensives. The paper added that Ukraine’s willingness to compromise on the seized territories in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson was not dramatic from its perspective anyway, since Moscow already struggles to hold those lands.
Zelensky, who came to the summit in Washington hoping to secure advanced cruise missiles, emerged according to the report “very negative." One source speaking to the Financial Times said European leaders — Ukraine’s allies — are “not optimistic but pragmatic — with plans for the next steps.” The White House and Zelensky’s office have yet to respond to the FT’s report or the similar Reuters account.
Publicly, Trump called after the meeting for the fighting to stop along current frontline lines — a proposal that Kyiv supports but Putin rejects. “Enough blood has been shed, the borders were determined by war, they must stop where they are,” Trump wrote on his social‑media platform Truth Social. “Both should declare victory, let history decide! No more shooting, no more death, no more wasting huge sums of money. Thousands of people every week are being slaughtered — no more. Go home to your families in peace!”
One source cited in Sunday’s Reuters report said Trump issued this public call for a cessation along the current frontlines after Zelensky told him in their meeting that he was not prepared to cede any territory to Moscow.