The Kremlin has downplayed the possibility of an immediate meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, even as President Donald Trump has renewed his call for the two leaders to meet to end the war.
The push for a bilateral meeting follows Trump’s recent meeting with Putin in Alaska and a visit from seven European leaders and Zelensky to the White House on Monday.
Trump admitted the conflict was “a tough one” to solve and acknowledged that Putin might not be interested in ending hostilities. “We’re going to find out about President Putin in the next couple of weeks,” he said on Tuesday. “It’s possible that he doesn’t want to make a deal.”
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If that’s the case, Putin would face a “rough situation,” Trump added, without providing details.
In an interview with conservative radio host Mark Levin late Tuesday, Trump suggested it “would be better” if Putin and Zelensky met without him. However, he added he would attend a meeting “if necessary” but wanted to “see what happens” first.
On Monday, the Russian president told Trump that he was “open” to direct talks with Ukraine. But the next day, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov softened that vague commitment. Any meeting would have to be prepared “gradually… starting with the expert level and thereafter going through all the required steps,” he said, echoing a frequent Kremlin position.
Dmitry Polyanskiy, a Russian deputy representative to the UN, told the BBC that while “nobody had rejected” the idea of direct talks, “it shouldn’t be a meeting for the sake of a meeting.”
NATO military chiefs are expected to hold a virtual meeting on Wednesday, while the UK’s military chief, Admiral Tony Radakin, is traveling to Washington for discussions on deploying a reassurance force in Ukraine.
It was reported on Tuesday that Putin had suggested to Trump that Zelensky could travel to Moscow for talks a proposal Ukraine was unlikely to accept. The offer may have been Russia’s way of proposing a far-fetched option that Kyiv would not agree to.
Talks over the last few days seem to have given Trump a new understanding of the war’s complexities and the vast difference between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s positions.
The much-touted ceasefire he said he could get Putin to agree to has not happened. Now, the U.S. president says Ukraine and Russia should move directly to a permanent peace deal instead, but some progress was made on security guarantees for Ukraine.
Zelensky and European leaders appear to have convinced Trump that such commitments would be paramount to Kyiv’s sovereignty in a peace deal