WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Monday that in a bid to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, he plans to set up a direct meeting between the two countries' leaders, followed by a trilateral meeting in which he would take part.
Trump revealed the next steps in his attempt to broker a peace deal on Truth Social after a full afternoon of meetings at the White House with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders who are eager to see Ukraine safeguarded from future Russian aggression.
When the talks ended, Trump wrote, he called Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the arrangements. He spoke to Putin for about 40 minutes in the Oval Office without the European leaders present.
"Everyone is very happy about the possibility of PEACE for Russia/Ukraine," Trump wrote.
Trump's report comes amid a rapid-fire effort on his part to end a conflict that began more than three years ago with Russia's invasion of its smaller democratic neighbor.
He flew to Alaska on Friday for a face-to-face meeting with Putin and then hastened to invite Zelenskyy and the European leaders to the White House on Monday to make more progress.
The gathering that Trump hosted was an extraordinary spectacle in its own right, carrying echoes of the Second World War. On one day, under one roof, Western leaders assembled in hopes of ending a conflict between a vulnerable European democracy and a bigger dictatorship bent on gobbling up more territory.
Trump met with Zelenskyy at the White House for about an hour in an accelerated effort to end the war on terms acceptable to both sides. The pair then met with European leaders to work toward a breakthrough in a conflict that Trump himself has cautioned could erupt in a third world war if it were allowed to persist.
Trump greeted Zelenskyy in the early afternoon with a smile and a warm handshake — a stark difference from the tense televised meeting the two men held in February in the Oval Office.
Trump took note of Zelenskyy's more decorous look. Ditching his traditional wartime garb, he wore a dark, formal jacket with a collar.
"The best I had," Zelenskyy told him.
"I love it!" Trump said.
Fresh off his summit with Putin, Trump sat down with Zelenskyy to see whether they can resolve sticking points centered on Ukraine's future security and the status of territory the Russian military has seized in eastern and southern Ukraine.
Zelenskyy said later that their private meeting in the Oval Office went well. “We had a very good conversation,” he said. “Maybe the best one.”
Asked whether U.S. troops would help secure a peace deal, Trump did not rule out the possibility.
As a condition of ending the war, Putin has insisted that his country retain about 20% of Ukrainian territory that it now controls. Zelenskyy has said Ukraine's constitution forbids him to cede any land.
Trump and Zelenskyy spoke to the news media in the Oval Office before they went behind closed doors. Trump suggested he will not abandon efforts to forge a peace deal, though he conceded the Russia-Ukraine conflict has proved particularly stubborn.
"It's never the end of the road," Trump said. "People are being killed, and we want to stop that. So I would say it's not the end of the road. I think we have a good chance of doing it."
When a reporter asked whether he was prepared redraw Ukraine's map if it would end the war sooner, Zelenskyy did not answer directly.
"We need to stop this war," he said. "To stop Russia, we need support from American and from European partners."
Upon finishing the meeting, Trump and Zelenskyy went straight to another meeting with the European leaders: French President Emmanuel Macron, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
"We will come to a resolution today I think on almost everything, including probably the security," Trump said before the start of that meeting.
After they finished the talks, Trump and the European leaders moved into the Oval Office for further discussions, according to a White House official.
Europe looms large in any accord between the combatants. Looking to prevent future Russian attacks, European nations would be an important part of any security guarantees that Ukraine has requested as part of any peace deal.
But the United States also may play a part, Trump said — a surprising admission from the "America First" president. If there is a Trump foreign policy doctrine, it is that he wants to extricate the United States from foreign wars and shift some of the peacekeeping burden from the United States to other countries.
Yet when he was asked whether he would deploy Americans to Ukraine to help preserve a peace deal, Trump did not dismiss the idea out of hand.
"We're going to work with Ukraine, we're going to work with everybody, and we're going to make sure that if there is peace, the peace is going to stay long-term," he said.
With the TV cameras present, the tone was far more cordial than in Zelenskyy's last visit. In that February meeting, Vice President JD Vance sat beside Trump and berated Zelenskyy for not showing enough gratitude to Trump. This time, Vance sat in the same place but stayed silent.
In the last visit, Trump memorably told Zelenskyy that he didn't hold any "cards" and that his country was "in big trouble."
“You’re gambling with World War III, and what you're doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country, that’s backed you,” he told Zelenskyy at the time.
The meeting was ultimately cut short.
Who holds the better "cards" at this point? a reporter asked Trump on Monday.
"I don't want to say that," he replied.
Trump has lately stepped up his role in ending the conflict. With an eye on the Nobel Peace Prize, he met privately with Putin at a military base in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday to jump-start peace talks. He and Putin strode down a red carpet together before a private meeting that lasted nearly three hours.
Though he said beforehand that he wanted a ceasefire, Trump left the summit without one and said he was shifting his aim, instead, toward a full-fledged "peace agreement."
The Trump administration's messaging has at times been muddled. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday on NBC News' “Meet the Press” that a ceasefire was “not off the table."
Rubio said in the interview that “no one is pushing Ukraine to give that up,” referring to land occupied by Russia. Later in the day, Trump appeared to undercut Rubio when he reposted a Truth Social user who declared, “Ukraine must be willing to lose some territory to Russia otherwise the longer the war goes on they will keep losing even more land!!”
Sunday night on Truth Social, Trump seemed to place the onus of ending the war on Zelenskyy, as opposed to Putin, who sent tanks rolling into Ukraine in February 2022.
Trump wrote that Ukraine must give up Russian-annexed Crimea and also abandon any hope of joining NATO — one of Putin's demands.
"President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight," Trump wrote.
Zelenskyy took a different stance. He wrote late Sunday on X that “Russia must end this war, which it itself started.”
The meetings Monday give the leaders a forum to discuss future security guarantees for Ukraine, which U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff floated as potentially looking similar to NATO’s Article 5.
Ukraine hopes to negotiate an ironclad security guarantee, similar to Article 5's all-for-one provision, and convince Trump that a temporary ceasefire is necessary to begin real peace talks, according to a Ukrainian source familiar with the goals. The security guarantees should be a treaty-level obligation, the source said, which require Senate approval.
A challenge for Zelenskyy is to persuade Trump that Russia should give up the territory it seized by force. A European official said it was their belief that Ukraine would never give up all of its eastern Donbas region, much of which Russia controls.
In the run-up to the Alaska summit, Trump said an end to the war would include “some swapping of territories.”
Zelenskyy promptly shot down the prospect, saying, “Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier.”
