Europe
Russia pounds Ukraine as Zelenskyy, Europe backers prepare to meet with Trump
By
The Washington Post August 18, 2025
Catherine Belton, Robyn Dixon and Kostiantyn Khudov
The Washington Post August 18, 2025
President Donald Trump welcomes Russian President Vladimir Putin to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, on Aug. 15, 2025 (Benjamin Applebaum/Department of Defense)
Russia renewed its missile attacks against Ukraine overnight as embattled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy prepared, alongside European leaders, for a White House meeting Monday that could decide the fate of his nation.
Russia launched ballistic missiles and 140 attack drones, killing at least seven people in Kharkiv, including an entire family, with two children and a grandmother. Russian strikes on the southern city of Zaporizhzhia killed three others, including a child, and wounded at least 20 more.
Zelenskyy condemned the attacks as “a demonstrative and cynical Russian strike” ahead of the White House talks on Monday that showed Ukraine’s need for “reliable security guarantees.”
“That is why Russia should not be rewarded for its participation in this war. The war must be ended,” he posted.
The new Russian onslaught came even as President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff presented Friday’s summit in Alaska as a “breakthrough” by winning Russia’s agreement to “robust security guarantees” for Ukraine involving the United States and Europe. Russia would enshrine into law a commitment not to make further territorial claims on Ukraine or attack any other countries once a peace agreement had been “codified,” he said.
The European leaders and Zelenskyy will urge Trump to spell out exactly what these security guarantees would mean, while trying to ensure a “unified transatlantic position with Ukraine,” according to a person briefed on the preparations for Monday’s meeting.
Senior former Western — and Russian — officials poured scorn on the suggestion that any Russian law would prevent the Kremlin from attacking again. Analysts warned that any Russian agreement on security guarantees for Ukraine would likely involve Russia insisting on a veto over any such arrangements — a stance Moscow took during earlier peace talks — rendering any guarantees potentially worthless.
Russia has promised to respect Ukraine’s internationally recognized border before, but it was still violated, Russia’s former foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev noted.
“There are several Russian legal commitments to respect the internationally recognized border between Ukraine and Russia, including a treaty Putin himself signed in 2003 — which he violated with the invasion that began in 2014 and escalates now,” he said.
Mike Carpenter, a former Biden-era National Security Council official, said in a post on Sunday “this has got to be satirical: the Russian Duma is going to provide the security guarantee that the Kremlin won’t reattack Ukraine? Wow.”
Reaching any agreement on security guarantees for Ukraine and how they would be implemented will also likely take months, allowing Russia to continue its military onslaught against Ukraine.
Zelenskyy, appearing alongside European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels on Sunday, expressed unease over the latest proposals, saying it was impossible to enter into negotiations with Moscow “under the pressure of weapons,” insisting, as before, that a full ceasefire must be in place before any discussions.
During Friday’s summit Putin warned against any European interference in the latest effort to resolve the conflict. “We expect that Kyiv and European capitals will take a constructive approach to all this and will not create any obstacles,” he said. “They will not attempt to disrupt the progress that is taking shape through provocation and behind-the-scenes intrigues.”
The idea that Ukraine and its European supporters are obstacles to peace has increasingly been pushed by the Kremlin and its commentators. Analyst Sergei Markov said the presence of the European leaders at the White House would undermine progress on a deal and involving NATO troops in security guarantees would mean “a breakdown of the peace process.”
Writing in a government newspaper, pro-Kremlin foreign policy analyst Fyodor Lukyanov said Friday’s summit showed that the Trump administration did not blame Russia for the war and was amping up pressure on Kyiv to end it. Trump has realized that he “can put pressure on Ukraine and force it to do something, but not Russia.
Friday’s summit in Anchorage saw Putin welcomed with a red carpet, a military flyby and a warm handshake, ending more than three years of condemnation and isolation over his war in Ukraine, apparently without the Russian leader having to make any concessions.
Trump told allies that Putin wanted all of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region as a condition for ending the war, including areas Russian soldiers have not managed to seize during years of fighting.
Zelenskyy said that while he was grateful for America’s apparent willingness to join in providing future security guarantees, more details need to be hammered out, such as what the United States’ role would be and what role European countries would play.
Von der Leyen, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Finnish President Alexander Stubb will join Zelenskyy on Monday for his White House visit — a dramatic gesture that underlines the importance of the conversation that will take place between Trump and Zelenskyy, and the need to drastically change the trajectory of the peace negotiations.
Even if Putin appeared to pay lip service to the idea of security guarantees during the Alaska summit, the Russian president was not likely to be willing to agree to anything like the protections provided by NATO after spending three years battling exactly against that, Russian analysts said.
Ukraine and its European allies are seeking to understand “whether its possible to really have robust security guarantees that are legally binding and whether the positions are close enough to have the next round of negotiations like the trilateral” meeting proposed by Trump with Zelenskyy and Putin, said the person familiar with the negotiations.
Questions are focused on whether they would be NATO-style security guarantees that would be ratified by Congress or whether they would amount to no more than the “assurances” like those offered in the Budapest Memorandum Ukraine signed in 1994 when it gave up its nuclear weapons. Those did little to protect it from Russia, however.
Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said Putin was more likely to revert to the type of security guarantees first presented by Moscow during Istanbul talks in March 2022, where Russia was to be given a veto over any defense decisions.
Russia would also not be willing to drop its demand that Ukraine radically reduce the size of its army, she said. “This demand, along with that of ‘denazification’, has not disappeared. Demilitarisation, for the Kremlin, is the only ‘real’ guarantee for Moscow that Ukraine will not rearm and seek revenge,” she wrote in a post on X. “Putin will not drop this demand, although the scale of army reduction may be somewhat negotiable and will depend on what else is agreed.”
One person familiar with the American briefing of European and Ukrainian officials following the summit said it would be impossible for Ukraine to agree to relinquish the contested territory in Donbas, not the least because this was a heavily fortified area, which, if taken by Russia, would leave Ukraine wide open to future attack.
“Donbas is a highly fortified territory. There are hills, and the rest of Ukraine is flat and unfortified so if [Putin] takes over Donbas he has a clear road all the way to Odesa. Russia for 11 years couldn’t take this part of Donbas by force,” this person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
Russia’s attacks Sunday and Monday, which killed four children, is the latest in a series of Russian strikes on civilian targets in recent months, including a children’s playground, maternity hospitals, houses, apartments and civilian transports.
The Russian attacks had once frustrated Trump, who said that Putin appeared pleasant in meetings, but has continued attacks that keep killing civilians.
“I’ve had a lot of good conversations with him,” he said before Friday’s summit meeting. “Then I go home and I see that a rocket hit a nursing home or a rocket hit an apartment building and people are laying dead in the streets.” He vowed “very severe” consequences on Russia if Putin continued the war after Friday’s summit, but after the meeting he said that sanctions were no longer immediately needed.
Russia’s overnight attacks also destroyed an oil depot belonging to Azerbaijani oil company SOCAR, according to the head of the Odesa Regional State Administration, Oleh Kiper.
It was the second attack on Azerbaijan’s Ukrainian assets this month and came after Azerbaijani media reported that President Ilham Aliyev was considering sending weapons to Ukraine, rather than just humanitarian aid, if such attacks continued. On Aug. 10, Zelenskyy and Aliyev condemned Russian strikes in Azerbaijan’s facilities in a phone call.
Zelenskyy said the “deliberate” strike on the Azerbaijani oil facility showed that Russia’s attacks were “not only on us but also on our relations and energy security.”