President Trump is weighing a meeting in the coming weeks with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as he presses for an end to the fighting in Ukraine.
Trump raised the idea of meeting with the two leaders during a call with European allies on Wednesday, a source confirmed to The Hill. It was not immediately clear when or where the meeting might happen, or if it had been agreed to by all parties.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Russia had expressed an interest in meeting with Trump.
“As President Trump said earlier today on TRUTH Social, great progress was made during Special Envoy Witkoff’s meeting with President Putin,” Leavitt said in a statement. “The Russians expressed their desire to meet with President Trump, and the President is open to meeting with both President Putin and President Zelensky. President Trump wants this brutal war to end.”
The New York Times first reported that Trump was aiming to meet with Putin and Zelensky as soon as next week. The outlet reported that Trump told European leaders that the meeting would involve only Trump, Putin and Zelensky, though it was not clear if Putin or Zelensky had agreed to participate.
“Russia confirms Putin-Trump summit may happen next week and summit preparations are ongoing. This can be a historic meeting. Dialogue will prevail,” Putin’s envoy for investment and economic cooperation Kirill Dmitriev said in a Thursday post on the social media platform X.
Another top Putin aide, Yuri Ushakov, echoed the possibility of the meeting with the two leaders next week, the first huddle by a U.S. president with the Russian leader since 2021.
“At the suggestion of the American side, an agreement was essentially reached to hold a bilateral meeting at the highest level in the coming days, that is, a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump,” Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, said on Thursday.
