US President Donald Trump said on Monday that he was brokering a meeting between Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and their Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to be followed by a trilateral meeting that would include the US leader.
The declaration followed back-to-back meetings at the White House, including Trump’s in-person meeting with the Ukrainian president, in which he also dangled the possibility of US troops supporting Ukraine. He also met jointly with Zelensky, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and other top leaders from across the Atlantic.
“Everyone is very happy about the possibility of PEACE for Russia/Ukraine,” Trump said on social media. “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 Zelensky. After that meeting takes place, we will have a Trilat, which would be the two Presidents, plus myself.”
Trump added that the larger group “discussed Security Guarantees for Ukraine, which Guarantees would be provided by the various European Countries, with a coordination with the United States of America”.
However, disagreement over the timing of a ceasefire remains to be overcome.
Merz, for example, insisted in a social media post that one needs to be in place prior to any further talks.
The Kremlin confirmed that Putin and Trump held a phone call on Monday, in which the US leader discussed the day’s negotiations with Zelensky and the other leaders.
Putin’s assistant Yuri Ushakov said in a briefing that “Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump expressed their support for continuing direct negotiations between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations in this regard. In particular, they discussed the idea that it would be worthwhile to explore the possibility of raising the level of representatives.”
“It is noteworthy that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump agreed to continue to maintain close contact with each other on Ukrainian and other pressing issues on the international and bilateral agenda,” he said.
Sitting with Trump earlier, Zelensky told reporters that he supported the US leader’s personal involvement in ending the conflict.
“We support the idea of the United States, and on a personal level, President Trump to stop this war, to make diplomatic way of finishing this war,” he said. “And we are ready for trilateral. As President said, this is good signal about [a] trilateral. I think this is very good.”
Monday’s flurry of meetings followed Trump’s largely amicable summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, last week, in which the US leader has drawn criticism for backing away from his threat of “severe consequences” for Moscow if Putin refused to agree to a ceasefire.
In the three days since the high-profile visit to America, where Putin received a red carpet reception, Trump had seemed to drift more towards the Russian leader’s position, prompting EU leaders to show their determination to back Zelensky by travelling to Washington to meet the US leader together with the Ukrainian president.
Trump’s latest stance on Russia’s war against Ukraine includes a preference for a comprehensive peace deal that would appear to require Kyiv to make concessions – including the forfeiture of some Ukrainian territory, which Zelensky has previously said he is not prepared to give – instead of an immediate ceasefire.
Trump said Sunday that Zelensky could end the war “almost immediately, if he wants to” but that, for Ukraine, there was “no getting back” Crimea and “NO GOING INTO NATO”.
Seven top European leaders arrived in Washington in an effort to push Trump into offering “ironclad” US security guarantees to Ukraine in the event of an end to the three-year war. In addition to Von der Leyen and Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Finnish President Alexander Stubb are included. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte were also with the Zelensky delegation.
In Brussels, the joint effort is seen as an attempt to counterbalance Trump’s move towards Putin’s position and to avoid a repeat of Zelensky’s infamous Oval Office defenestration in February, when he was banished from the White House after clashing with Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance.
Trump appeared to endorse plans for Nato to buy weapons – Patriot Missile systems, in particular – that Ukraine needs to repel Russian forces, and hinted at the possibility of US troops being involved.
Asked whether he would rule out the latter, Trump said: “We’ll let you know that maybe later today.”
“We’re meeting with seven great leaders of great countries also, and we’ll be talking about that,” he added. “They’ll all be involved ... when it comes to security there’s going to be a lot of help. It’s going to be good. They are first line of defence because they’re there. They’re Europe. But we’re going to help them out also. We’ll be involved.”
In a briefing full of long diversions in which the president blamed former president Joe Biden for the war, Trump also spent much of his time assailing voting machines and mail-in election ballots.
Those comments were in line with a social media post he issued shortly before the meeting with Zelensky, in which he teased an executive order ahead of next year’s midterm polls targeting both long-time components of US elections.
While the trilateral idea went down well with the European leaders supporting Zelensky, with Starmer and Stubb explicitly expressing approval, differences emerged over the need for a ceasefire.
“I can’t imagine that the next meeting would take place without a ceasefire, so let’s work on that, and let’s try to put pressure on Russia,” Merz said during opening remarks.
Trump said in response: “In the six wars that I’ve settled, I haven’t had a ceasefire. We just got into negotiations.”
Merz repeated his call just a few minutes after Trump announced that he was organising the Zelensky-Putin meeting.
Speaking ahead of the joint meeting in the White House on Monday, Macron sought to frame a ceasefire as something that Trump had previously pushed for.
“Your idea to ask for a truce, or at least to stop the killings ... is a necessity, and we all support this idea,” he said.
The French president also pushed for a quadrilateral meeting involving EU leadership to follow any trilateral that might emerge, “because when we speak about security guarantees, we speak about the whole security of the European continent”. - SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
