Europe fears Ukraine — and itself — are being excluded from Trump-Putin talks

European leaders are trying to get Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy invited to Trump and Putin's summit in Alaska.

LONDON — Europe is scrambling to stop itself and Ukraine from being frozen out of peace talks between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, fearing they could reshape the military and political future of the Continent without them.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself recounted upward of 15 phone calls with world leaders and others this weekend, from France and Germany to the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, as news sunk in that there may be no one at the meeting from the country that has been occupied and bombed for more than three years.

“We cannot accept” territorial questions being “discussed or even decided between Russia and America over the heads of Europeans and Ukrainians,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told his country’s state broadcaster ARD on Sunday. “I assume that the American government sees it the same way.”

Sidelined from the Trump-Putin tete-a-tete, Merz and other European leaders issued a joint statement Sunday saying that “the path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine.”

Trump announced last week that he would join Putin in Alaska on Friday for their first face-to-face discussion of his second term, and the first with the Russian president by any G-7 leader since Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022.