President Donald Trump announced that he was arranging a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, followed by a trilateral meeting.
After the historic meeting in Alaska between Trump and Putin, Zelensky traveled to the White House with French President Emmanuel Macron, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte. The meeting went far better than Zelensky’s February solo trip, featuring an hourslong discussion on a sustainable peace agreement to end the war in Ukraine.
At the conclusion of the meeting, Trump said it went “very good.” He said they discussed security guarantees for Ukraine, which would be “provided by the various European Countries, with a coordination with the United States of America.”
“Everyone is very happy about the possibility of PEACE for Russia/Ukraine,” Trump proclaimed.
The biggest breakthrough, discussed at the end of the meeting, was a meeting between the two warring states that Zelensky had apparently agreed to.
“At the conclusion of the meetings, I called President Putin, and began the arrangements for a meeting, at a location to be determined, between President Putin and President Zelenskyy. After that meeting takes place, we will have a Trilat, which would be the two Presidents, plus myself. Again, this was a very good, early step for a War that has been going on for almost four years,” the president said.
Trump expressed his hopes earlier in the day that a trilateral meeting could bring about an end to the war.
“If everything works out today, we will have a trilat and I think there will be a reasonable chance of ending the war if we do that,” he said.
“The war is going to end when it ends. I can’t tell you [when], but the war is going to end, and this gentleman [Zelensky] wants it to end, and Vladimir Putin wants it to end,” Trump added.
Despite Trump’s hopeful stance, a meeting between Putin and Zelensky would be unlikely to bring about a swift end to the war due to the lingering mutually exclusive conditions of Moscow and Kyiv. The Monday Oval Office meeting doesn’t appear to have outwardly addressed the key sticking points of Putin’s latest peace deal, especially Ukraine ceding the Donbas and currently occupied territory in Kherson and Zaporozhye oblasts.
Zelensky has repeatedly ruled out any ceding of territory, and his European allies have repeatedly stressed that Russia can’t be allowed to take any territory by force.
Russia also insists that Ukraine’s military must be downsized post-war, another nonstarter for Kyiv. Domestic demands to make Russian a second official language of Ukraine and the protection of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church are viewed as impeding on Ukraine’s sovereignty.
Ukraine also insists on a ceasefire before a peace deal, while Russia views a ceasefire as simply a measure to allow Kyiv’s forces to regroup.
TRUMP AND ZELENSKY PLAY NICE: TOP TAKEAWAYS FROM HIGH-STAKES OVAL OFFICE REDO
Despite this, a possible, if tense, meeting between Zelensky and Putin would be a major step in securing a lasting peace deal.
Meanwhile, on the battlefield, Kyiv appears to have plugged an alarming gap in its lines east of the fortress city of Pokrovsk that threatened to collapse its defensive line but, in doing so, weakened other parts of the front. Russia maintains its momentum and has continued battering Ukrainian industry across the country. This month’s breakthrough near Pokrovsk illustrated the teetering state of Ukraine’s military, but Zelensky has shown no signs of ceding any further territory peacefully.
