President Donald Trump said Thursday that a meeting between Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian leader Vladimir Putin wasn’t a condition for him to meet with Putin in what would be their first in-person encounter of Trump’s second term.
Trump’s remarks came hours after a White House official said that Putin and Zelenskyy must meet in order for a summit with Trump to occur.
The Kremlin said earlier in the day that a meeting between Trump and Putin had been agreed in principle and would happen in the “coming days.”
“At the suggestion of the American side, an agreement in principle was made to hold a bilateral meeting at the highest level in the coming days,” Putin’s longtime foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov said in an audio statement.
At the same time, Moscow all but dismissed Trump’s proposal for a three-way summit involving Putin and Zelenskyy, continuing the Kremlin’s long-standing resistance to such a sit-down.
The idea of a Trump-Putin-Zelenskyy meeting “for some reason was mentioned by Washington yesterday” but “not specifically discussed,” Ushakov said Thursday. The Russian side had “left this option completely, completely without comment.”
Asked by a reporter in the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon whether Putin needed to meet with the Ukrainian president before sitting down with Trump, the U.S. president said, “No, he doesn’t.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement shortly before Trump’s Oval Office remarks that “the Russians expressed their desire to meet with President Trump, and the President is open to this meeting.”
“President Trump would like to meet with both President Putin and President Zelensky because he wants this brutal war to end,” she said, adding that the White House is “working through the details of these potential meetings and details will be provided at the appropriate time.”
Trump’s efforts to meet with Putin are part of his campaign promise to resolve Russia’s war in Ukraine, and his wider “America First” pledge to end involvement in foreign conflicts altogether.
But Trump — who once said he could end the war in 24 hours — has found the reality more difficult.
On meeting Zelenskyy, Putin said earlier Thursday he had “nothing against it — it is possible — but for this to happen, certain conditions must be created. Unfortunately, such conditions are far away yet,” he added. In the past, he has described Ukraine’s government as illegitimate, saying he would only meet Zelenskyy during the “final” phase of negotiations.
Putin suggested that he could meet with Trump in the United Arab Emirates. Asked about which side proposed the meeting, he added, “Interest was shown on both sides. Who said what first? It is no longer important.”
Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, enjoyed a cordial visit to Moscow on Wednesday with Putin and his close friend and investment chief, Kirill Dmitriev.
Briefing Trump after the meeting, Witkoff told the president that Putin would like to meet, according to the White House official. Trump responded that he was open to that but that he also would want for Putin to meet with Zelenskyy to discuss a ceasefire, the official said.
Friday is the deadline ultimatum issued by Trump to Putin, challenging him to end the war in Ukraine or face tough new economic sanctions.
But Trump suggested Thursday afternoon that the deadline might not be as firm as previously stated.
“We’re going to see what he has to say. It’s going to be up to him. Very disappointed,” Trump told reporters at the White House when asked if the Friday deadline remains intact.
Secondary sanctions on Russia are still expected to be implemented Friday, according to two White House officials and a senior administration official.
Trump on Wednesday slapped an additional 25% tariff on India in an apparent punishment for its purchase of Russian oil. He has suggested that Friday he could issue a 100% secondary tariff on any nation that buys Russian goods — something that would hugely impact China, Russia’s biggest petrochemicals customer — unless Putin agrees to a ceasefire.
That’s a culmination of recent weeks in which the American leader has adopted far tougher language toward his Russian counterpart — decrying Russia’s continued bombing of Ukrainian civilians and pledging arms sales to Ukraine via Europe.
Despite this renewed pressure from Washington, the Kremlin has shown no sign of modifying its maximalist war goals, including the long-term seizure of even more Ukrainian territory, a promise it would never join the NATO defense alliance, and the neutering of its military and geopolitical independence.
Western independent analysts say these terms would effectively render it a vassal of the Kremlin.
Ukraine has in the past reacted with alarm to the prospect of being excluded from Russian-American negotiations about its own fate.
After representatives from Washington and Moscow held talks in Istanbul, in February, Zelenskyy lamented that “once again, decisions about Ukraine are being made without Ukraine.”
On Thursday, Zelenskyy said several formats for “leader-level” meetings to end the war had been discussed — “two bilateral and one trilateral.”
“Ukraine is not afraid of meetings and expects the same brave approach from the Russian side,” he wrote in a post on X. “It is time we ended the war.”
