President Donald Trump will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hungary following a preliminary meeting of “high-level advisers.”
Trump spoke to his Russian counterpart on Thursday via phone call, in which they “agreed that there will be a meeting” between Russian diplomats and a team led by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio next week.
“A meeting location is to be determined. President Putin and I will then meet in an agreed upon location, Budapest, Hungary, to see if we can bring this ‘inglorious’ War, between Russia and Ukraine, to an end,” Trump announced following the call.
“I believe great progress was made with today’s telephone conversation,” he added.
It’s a surprising outcome for the phone call, considering Trump’s escalating animosity toward his one-time “friend” due to an inability to conclude the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The two leaders spoke for over an hour, both the White House and the Kremlin confirmed.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will arrive at the White House on Friday, where Trump is expected to discuss his conversation with Putin, “and much more.”
Trump has soured in his attitude toward Putin following months of stalled peace negotiations that the U.S. president believes betrayed his trust in his Russian counterpart to dialogue in good faith.
“We get a lot of bulls*** thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump told his Cabinet in a July meeting. “He’s very nice all of the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”
The White House’s efforts to bring Putin to the negotiating table culminated in an unprecedented summit in Anchorage, Alaska. Trump left the bilateral meeting optimistic, expecting Putin to sit down with Zelensky and hash out a preliminary agreement that he would then mediate.
Weeks passed as Russia continued to bombard Ukraine without even making a pass at further negotiations.
Last month, Trump seemed to have finally snapped and completely reversed his views about the conflict.
“After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation and, after seeing the Economic trouble it is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” he wrote on Truth Social. “With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option. Why not? Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a War that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win.”
Putin may have used the Thursday phone call to make yet another appeal to Trump’s ego, with the U.S. president recounting that the Russian leader praised his recent successes in Gaza.
“President Putin congratulated me and the United States on the Great Accomplishment of Peace in the Middle East, something that, he said, has been dreamed of for centuries,” Trump wrote in his post-meeting read-out. “I actually believe that the Success in the Middle East will help in our negotiation in attaining an end to the War with Russia/Ukraine.”
He added, “We also spent a great deal of time talking about Trade between Russia and the United States when the War with Ukraine is over.”
Noticeably absent from Trump’s post-meeting statement was any reference to long-range weapons.
The provision of long-range weapons to Ukraine — particularly the U.S.-made Tomahawk missile — has become the axis around which the East-West conflict now turns.
Expressing optimism about the prospect of Tomahawk missiles eventually coming into the hands of the Ukrainian military, Zelensky said last month that Kremlin officials will need to “know where the bomb shelters are.”
NATO has established a weapons-trading scheme known as the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, in which European allies purchase U.S.-made weapons and provide them to Ukraine for national defense.
“They need it. If they will not stop the war, they will need it in any case,” Zelensky said. “They have to know that we in Ukraine, each day, we will answer. If they attack us, we will answer them.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said Wednesday at NATO headquarters in Brussels that “hard power” is the “only thing belligerents actually respect.”
Andrey Kartapolov, head of the defense committee in the Russian Parliament, said last week that the Russian military intends to shoot down any Tomahawk cruise missiles the United States sends to Ukraine.
“We will find ways to hurt those who cause us trouble,” Kartapolov warned. “If Ukraine were to prepare launch sites, we would detect them and use drones and missiles to destroy any launchers.”
He added that he hopes “those who are pushing Washington toward such decisions fully understand the gravity and depth of the potential consequences.”
Putin himself has warned that the provision of long-range weapons and assistance in using them would be viewed as the U.S. crossing a red line and actively participating in the war, calling the hypothetical scenario a “completely new, qualitatively new stage of escalation.”
HEGSETH TELLS NATO THE WAR DEPARTMENT ‘STANDS READY TO DO OUR PART’ TO ‘IMPOSE COSTS ON RUSSIA’
Zelensky, meanwhile, has arranged for the Ukrainian diplomatic envoy to meet with weapons manufacturers and defense companies while in the U.S. this week.
“I will meet with these companies because there are pressing needs linked to various formats of attacks, not even the attacks that Russia has already carried out,” the Ukrainian leader said.
