Trump rules out U.S. troops in Ukraine peace deal, offers air support instead

Donald Trump stood before cameras on Tuesday and made a flat declaration: no American soldiers would be sent to Ukraine as part of any peace agreement with Russia. The statement came less than a week after he had met with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and it carried the weight of a personal guarantee. When pressed on what assurance he could offer that ground troops would stay home, Trump offered only his word. "You have my guarantee, and I am the president," he said during an interview with Fox News.

The alternative, Trump suggested, was air support. The United States could help Ukraine defend itself through the sky without putting boots on the ground—a distinction that mattered enormously to him, even as the specifics of what that assistance would look like remained vague. The timing of the statement was significant: it came as European leaders were huddling in urgent meetings about what security arrangements might look like after the fighting stopped, meetings that had been hastily arranged following Trump's White House session with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenski and the continent's top officials.

Those European conversations revealed a widening gap in how different parties imagined the end of this war. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron were pushing for a contingent of foreign forces—hundreds of observers or defensive troops—to remain in Ukraine after any ceasefire, a proposal Russia flatly rejected. Zelenski, for his part, had emerged from his Oval Office meeting in a warmer mood than in previous encounters with Trump. The two had discussed security guarantees that might prevent Russia from invading again. Though no formal agreement existed, Zelenski indicated that Ukraine would purchase ninety billion dollars in American weapons through European channels, while the United States would acquire Ukrainian drones in return.

Yet the fundamental positions remained far apart. Russia wanted territorial concessions—land it had seized during the invasion. Ukraine wanted a ceasefire first, before any discussion of giving up territory. Trump, eager for a quick resolution, insisted the deal could be struck without a truce. The gap between these positions was not a detail to be ironed out in a follow-up call. It was the core of the problem.

On Tuesday morning, before dawn, Russia had launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Ukrainian targets, wounding civilians and damaging power infrastructure, according to Ukrainian officials. The day before, Russian bombardment had killed fourteen people. The war was not pausing for negotiations. It was accelerating.

Trump had announced on social media after Monday's meetings that he had begun arranging a face-to-face summit between Zelenski and Putin. By Tuesday, the Kremlin was cooling that prospect considerably. According to Yuri Ushakov, Putin's foreign policy adviser, Trump and Putin had spoken by phone for forty minutes after the White House gathering. They had agreed to send more senior negotiators to direct talks between Moscow and Kyiv. But Putin himself attending such a meeting was not mentioned. Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov added that any presidential summit would need to be prepared "very carefully."

Behind the scenes, according to officials briefed on the conversations, Putin had proposed that if such a meeting were to happen, it should take place in Moscow. Zelenski, who had heard the suggestion relayed to him, said no. The European leaders in the room agreed it was not a good idea. Switzerland, meanwhile, had already signaled it would grant Putin immunity from arrest if he traveled there for peace talks, despite an International Criminal Court warrant hanging over him. The diplomatic machinery was grinding forward, but the fundamental obstacles—territory, security, trust—remained immovable.