NUUK — The top diplomats from Denmark and Greenland were to visit the White House on Wednesday for high-stakes talks following weeks of threats by President Donald Trump to take control of the autonomous Danish territory.

Greenland and Denmark say the island is not for sale, threats of force are reckless and security concerns should be resolved among allies. Prominent EU countries have backed Denmark.

Hours before the meeting was due to start, Danish Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen sought to ease US concerns about security in Greenland, telling AFP Denmark was boosting its military presence there and was in talks with allies on "an increased NATO presence in the Arctic."

When Denmark's Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen and his Greenlandic counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, meet Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at around 1530 GMT, their aim will be to de-escalate the crisis and find a diplomatic path to satisfy US demands for more control, analysts said.

"The end goal is to find some form of accommodation, or make a deal that would satisfy that need, or at least calm down the rhetoric sufficiently from Donald Trump," Andreas Osthagen, research director for Arctic and ocean politics at the Oslo-based Fridtjof Nansen Institute, told Reuters.

Noa Redington, an analyst and former political adviser to previous Danish premier Helle Thorning-Schmidt, said concerns were high in Denmark and Greenland that Motzfeldt and Rasmussen could be treated in the same way as Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy, when he suffered a public humiliation in a meeting with Trump - and Vance - at the White House in February 2025.

"This is the most important meeting in modern Greenland's history," he told Reuters.

Greenlandic leaders appear to be shifting their approach in how they are handling the diplomatic crisis.

Until recently, they were stressing Greenland's path to independence. But now their public statements put more emphasis on Greenland's unity with Denmark.

"It's not the time to gamble with our right to self-determination, when another country is talking about taking us over," Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen told Greenland daily Sermitsiaq in an interview published Wednesday.

"That doesn't mean that we don't want something in the future. But here and now we are part of the kingdom, and we stand with the kingdom. That's crucial in this serious situation," he said.

"We choose the Greenland we know today – as part of the Kingdom of Denmark," she said in a statement released by the Danish ambassador to the US late on Tuesday.

But that message appeared to be falling on deaf ears in Washington.

Trump, when asked by reporters late on Tuesday, dismissed Nielsen's statement that Greenland preferred to remain part of Denmark.

"That's their problem. I disagree with them. I don't know who he is. Don't know anything about him, but that's going to be a big problem for him," Trump said.

White House officials have been discussing various plans to bring Greenland under US control, including potential use of the US military and lump-sum payments to Greenlanders to convince them to secede.

Denmark's prime minister has said the hardest part in the dispute over Greenland's future may lie ahead.

"This is not just about Greenland or the kingdom, it's about the fact that you can't change borders by force, that you can't buy another people, and that small countries should not have to fear bigger countries," Frederiksen said on Tuesday.

Denmark and Greenland had originally sought a meeting with Rubio, hoping to have a discussion among top diplomats on resolving the crisis between the two NATO allies.

But Denmark's Rasmussen said Vance had also wanted to participate and that the vice president would host the meeting himself, at the White House. — Agencies