Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin is “just laughing” and laying “a trap” for the West to walk into if Ukraine ends up giving up land to Russia as part of a potential peace deal to end the war, the European Union’s top diplomat said Friday.
Putin has demanded, in part, that Ukraine cede the Donbas region in exchange for halting his army’s brutal, full-scale invasion.
But the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, warned that caving in to those demands would only reward the country that started the bloodshed.
“It was clear before the meeting that he wants the picture, but he got so much more. He got such a welcoming in America,” Kaja Kallas said in her warning about Vladimir Putin’s “trap.” REUTERSKallas, who is on the Kremlin’s “wanted list,” told BBC News that handing territory to Russia was a “trap that Putin wants us to walk into.”
“Putin is just laughing, not stopping the killing but increasing the killing,” Kallas said.
“I mean, the discussion [is] all about what Ukraine should give up, what the concessions that Ukraine is willing to [make],” she continued.
“Whereas we are forgetting that Russia has not made one single concession and they are the ones who are the aggressor here, they are the ones who are brutally attacking another country and killing people.”
Kallas stressed that President Trump’s efforts to broker a deal, including his high-profile meeting with Putin in Alaska last week, was a propaganda jackpot for the Kremlin because it’s “clear that Russia does not want peace.”
“Any promises that Putin has given so far, he hasn’t kept,” Kallas said.
Ukrainian firefighters work to extinguish a blaze in a residential building after Russian shelling hit the city of Kostiantynivka, Ukraine, on August 22, 2025. Anadolu via Getty Images“This is what he [Putin] wanted,” she added, referring to the Alaska summit. “It was clear before the meeting that he wants the picture, but he got so much more. He got such a welcoming in America.”
In the wake of last week’s summit, Putin had said the meeting would hopefully open up the road to peace in Ukraine.
However, less than a week after the anticipated sit-down, Putin’s forces struck a US-owned electronics factory in Ukraine while some 800 civilians were working there.
President Trump’s efforts to broker a deal, including his meeting with Putin in Alaska, was a propaganda jackpot for Russia, as it’s “clear that Russia does not want peace,” Kallas stressed. VYACHESLAV PROKOFYEV/SPUTNIK/KREMLIN POOL/EPA/ShutterstockIn addition to giving up the Donbas region, three sources familiar with top-level Kremlin thinking told Reuters Thursday that Putin is also demanding Ukraine renounce ambitions to join NATO, remain neutral and keep Western troops out of the country.
President Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, has repeatedly said the industrial Donbas region serves as a fortress holding back Russian advances deeper into Ukraine.
“If we’re talking about simply withdrawing from the east, we cannot do that,” he told reporters Thursday. “It is a matter of our country’s survival, involving the strongest defensive lines.”
With Post wires
