WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump met for about an hour at the White House on Monday with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an accelerating effort to end a grinding war with Russia on terms acceptable to both sides.
Trump greeted the Ukrainian leader in the early afternoon with a smile and warm handshake — a stark difference from the tense televised meeting the two men held in February in the Oval Office.
Fresh off a summit in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump summoned Zelenskyy to see if they can resolve sticking points centered on Ukraine’s future security and the status of territory that the Russian military has seized in eastern and southern Ukraine.
A number of European leaders joined Zelenskyy and Trump at the White House on Monday to work toward a breakthrough in a more than three year conflict that Trump himself has cautioned could erupt in a third world war if allowed to persist.
Asked if U.S. troops would help secure a peace deal, Trump did not rule out the possibility.
As a condition of ending the war, Putin has insisted that his country retain about 20% of Ukrainian territory that it now controls. For his part, Zelenskyy has said that Ukraine’s constitution forbids him to cede any land.
Trump and Zelenskyy spoke to the press corps in the Oval Office before meeting privately. The U.S. president suggested he won’t abandon efforts to forge a peace deal, though he conceded the Russia-Ukraine conflict has proved particularly stubborn.
“It’s never the end of the road,” Trump said. “People are being killed and we want to stop that. So, I would say it’s not the end of the road. I think we have a good chance of doing it.”
Zelenskyy sat to Trump’s right in a dark, formal outfit complete with a collar — a departure from his normal wartime garb, which Trump remarked upon favorably. (At Zelenskyy’s last meeting at the White House a reporter asked him why he wasn’t wearing a suit).
When a reporter asked if he was prepared redraw Ukraine’s map if it would end the war sooner, Zelenskyy did not answer directly.
“We need to stop this war,” he said. “To stop Russia, we need support from American and from European partners.”
When his meeting with Trump ended, Zelenskyy said: “We had a very good conversation — maybe the best one.”
What happens next is far from clear. Trump said he will call Putin when he’s done with the negotiations for the day. Depending on the progress made, he said he would try to convene a meeting that hasn’t happened since the war began — a trilateral summit with himself, Putin and Zelenskyy.
“A lot of people were killed last week,” Trump said, adding, “And I know the president [Zelenskyy], I know myself and, I believe, Vladimir Putin want to see it ended.”
Trump scheduled a full slate of afternoon meetings with Zelenskyy along with European officials including French President Emmanuel Macron, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Upon finishing his meeting with Zelenskyy, Trump and the Ukrainian president went straight to another meeting with the European leaders.
“We will come to a resolution today I think on almost everything, including probably the security,” Trump said before the start of that meeting.
Europe looms large in any accord between the combatants. Looking to prevent future Russian attacks, European nations would be an important part of any security guarantees that Ukraine has requested as part of any peace deal.
But the U.S. also may play a part, Trump said — a surprising admission from the “America First” president. If there’s a Trump foreign policy doctrine, it’s that he wants to extricate the U.S. from foreign wars and shift some of the peacekeeping burden from the U.S. to other countries.
Yet when asked if he would deploy Americans to Ukraine to help preserve a peace deal, Trump did not dismiss the idea out of hand.
“We’re going to work with Ukraine, we’re going to work with everybody and we’re going to make sure that if there is peace, the peace is going to stay longterm,” he said.
With the TV cameras present, the tone was far more cordial than in Zelenskyy’s last visit. In that February meeting, Vice President JD Vance sat beside Trump and berated Zelenskyy for not showing enough gratitude to the president. This time, Vance sat in the same place but stayed silent.
In the last visit, Trump memorably told Zelenskyy that he didn’t hold any “cards” and and that his country was “in big trouble.”
“You’re gambling with World War III, and what you doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country, that’s backed you,” Trump told Zelenskyy at the time.
The meeting was ultimately cut short.
Who holds the better “cards” at this point? a reporter asked Trump on Monday.
“I don’t want to say that,” the president replied.
Trump has lately stepped up his role in ending the conflict. With an eye on the Nobel Peace Prize, he met privately with Putin at a military base in Anchorage on Friday to jumpstart peace talks. He and Putin strode down a red carpet together before a private meeting that lasted nearly three hours.
Though he said beforehand he wanted a ceasefire, Trump left the the summit without one and said he was shifting his aim instead toward a full-fledged “peace agreement.”
The Trump administration’s messaging has at times been muddled. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that a ceasefire was “not off the table.”
In the same interview, Rubio said that “no one is pushing Ukraine to give that up,” referring to land occupied by Russia. Later in the day, Trump appeared to undercut Rubio when he reposted a Truth Social user who declared, “Ukraine must be willing to lose some territory to Russia otherwise the longer the war goes on they will keep losing even more land!!”
In a post to Truth Social Sunday night, Trump seemed to place the onus of ending the war on Zelenskyy, as opposed to Putin, who sent tanks rolling into Ukraine in February 2022.
Trump wrote that Ukraine must give up Russian-annexed Crimea and also abandon any hopes of joining NATO — one of Putin’s demands.
“President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight,” Trump wrote in his post.
Zelenskyy took a different posture. In a post on X late Sunday, he wrote that “Russia must end this war, which it itself started.”
The meetings on Monday give the leaders a forum to discuss future security guarantees for Ukraine, which U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff floated as potentially looking similar to NATO’s Article 5.
Ukraine hopes to negotiate an ironclad security guarantee, similar to Article 5’s all-for-one provision, and convince Trump that a temporary ceasefire is necessary to begin real peace talks, according to a Ukrainian source familiar with the goals. The security guarantees should be a treaty-level obligation, the source said, which require Senate approval.
A challenge for Zelenskyy is persuading Trump that Russia should give up the territory it seized by force. One European official said it was their belief that Ukraine would never give up all of its eastern Donbas region, much of which Russia controls.
In the run-up to the Alaska summit, Trump said that an end to the war would include “some swapping of territories.”
Zelenskyy promptly shot down the prospect, saying that “Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier.”