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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday that he and U.S. President Donald Trump had a “good” conversation on the issue of security guarantees for Ukraine as the war with Russia enters its fourth year.

Zelenskyy, who was speaking at the White House alongside Trump and European leaders, said security guarantees are “at the core of our survival as a state, our future independence.” “The first one is security guarantees. And we are very happy with President [Trump], that all the leaders are here, and security in Ukraine depends on the United States and European countries,” Zelenskyy said. He said Washington’s willingness to send a strong signal of support is “very important,” but he did not elaborate on what security guarantees might look like.

Trump stressed security guarantees as well, but said European countries need to shoulder most of the burden. Trump also said that “the war can’t be solved” without having “very, very tough talks” over land transfers. “We’re going to help them, and we’re going to make it very secure,” Trump said. “We also need to discuss the possible exchanges of territory, taking into consideration the current line of contact. That means the war zone, the war line center.”

At Monday’s White House meeting, Western leaders were sharply divided over how to balance support for Ukraine with a negotiated peace effort. While Trump appeared open to discussing territory concessions, Zelenskyy has repeatedly said Ukraine will never cede any part of its sovereign territory.

Sanctions, Ceasefire, and NATO Status

Leaders in Washington on Monday were also talking about guarantees. As the U.S. and its European allies debate how to support Ukraine, U.S. lawmakers have been sharpening their calls for economic sanctions targeting Russia and its trading partners. Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the Trump administration should be more aggressive with Russia’s money. He said the U.S. should target countries that are still purchasing oil from Moscow, such as China, India, and Turkey. He is a co-sponsor of a bill that would empower Trump to levy tariffs of up to 500 percent on any country that continues to do business with Russia.

“My advice to President Trump and [Secretary of State Marco Rubio] is, you’ve got to convince Putin that if this war doesn’t end justly and honorably with Ukraine making concessions also, we’re going to destroy the Russian economy,” Graham said on Fox News. He added that if the U.S. wanted to end the war, then Washington must also target China, which has been much slower to back sanctions against Moscow. “The second most important person on the planet to end this war is President Xi in China,” Graham said.

Trump has already demonstrated a willingness to weaponize tariffs, having announced a 50 percent tariff on India over its refusal to end purchases of Russian oil in August. Graham said Trump could “unload the same kind of tariffs” on China if the Chinese government continued to prop up the Kremlin.

In Europe, the European Union is in the final stages of planning its 19th round of sanctions against Russia. The new penalties, to be announced later this month, are aimed at further squeezing Moscow’s energy revenue, banking sector, and military-industrial complex, while patching loopholes used by sanctioned Russians to do business in the West. The EU has now sanctioned a Russian individual or company every two days since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Overall, more than 16,000 Russian entities are now on the EU’s sanctions list, compared to a few dozen or hundreds for such pariah states as Iran, North Korea, or Venezuela. Russia has now become the most sanctioned country in modern history.

Sanctions are not the only thorny issue. European leaders also wanted Trump to consider a ceasefire before any serious negotiations could be held. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz pushed for a temporary truce, arguing that peace talks would otherwise lack credibility. “I can’t imagine that the next meeting would take place without a ceasefire,” Merz said. Trump disagreed, noting that several of the six agreements he says to have brokered with Russia in the past few months were signed without a ceasefire. “You have a ceasefire, and they rebuild and rebuild and rebuild,” Trump said. “The real beauty of the ceasefire is the human lives that are not being lost.”

Finnish President Alexander Stubb was also present for the White House talks. The new Finnish leader, who was sworn in March 2024, has been more openly skeptical of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intent to respect a ceasefire, pointing to the Finnish people’s experiences with their giant neighbor to the east. “We have an 800-mile-long border with Russia,” Stubb said, adding that Finland’s support for Ukraine is the “modern-day equivalent” of the country’s decision to join NATO after World War II. Stubb, who has been one of Trump’s closest European interlocutors in recent years, said it is “very, very positive” that Trump and Putin were speaking, but “the reality is that Putin has violated every single ceasefire that we have had.” He continued, “If I look at the silver lining of where we stand right now, we found a solution in 1944, and I’m sure that we’ll be able to find a solution in 2025 to end Russia’s war of aggression.”

The sharp contrast between Zelenskyy’s calls for long-term Western guarantees and Trump’s insistence that concessions were required underscored deep divisions in Washington and Europe over how to end the war. With new EU sanctions on the way, rising threats of tariffs, and continued battlefield fighting, the path to peace was anything but clear, caught between demands for both compromise and solidarity.