Trump only one who can force Putin to negotiating table, Finnish president says

The US leader said on Friday that Putin “wants to get it ended. I think that President Zelensky wants to get it ended. Now we have to get it done”.

Zelensky said in the White House that Ukraine was ready to talk in any format and wanted peace, but argued that Putin needed to be “pressured” into ending the war.

In August, Trump and Putin met in Alaska for a summit that did not result in a breakthrough, or yield a further meeting involving Zelensky.

Stubb said Trump had once asked him – over a game of golf – whether he could trust Putin; and Stubb’s answer was no.

“What we need is not so much the power of the carrot to convince Russia to the negotiating table, it’s more of the stick that will bring them.

“So you have to force Russia to come to the negotiating table for peace and that’s the deal President Trump is trying to make.”

He said Trump “has been giving the carrot to President Putin, and the carrot was in Alaska, and of course now if you look at the language that he has put forward lately, there has been more stick”.

Stubb was optimistic about Trump’s ability, saying he believed peace negotiations had probably advanced more in the past eight months during Trump’s second term than in the previous three years.

Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Stubb said Finland would never recognise Crimea, or the regions of Donetsk or Luhansk, as Russian. Russia controls 70% of Donetsk and nearly all of neighbouring Luhansk.

He said “the only ones who can decide on the land issue are the Ukrainians themselves”.

“I want to make sure that Ukraine, when this war is over, retains its independence, retains its sovereignty – in other words becomes an EU member state and hopefully a Nato member – and also maintains its territorial integrity. That is what we are all fighting for right now,” Stubb said.

Trump said in August that there would be “no going into Nato by Ukraine” as part of a peace deal.

The US president previously floated the idea that there may be some “land swaps” in a future peace deal, but then, in September, said Kyiv could “win all of Ukraine back in its original form”.

When asked why Trump had apparently changed his tune, Stubb said it was because Russia was not advancing – seizing only 1% of Ukrainian territory in the past 1,000 days. Ukraine had also been able to push back, he said.