President Donald Trump said Thursday that a meeting between Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian leader Vladimir Putin wasn’t a condition for him to meet with Putin in what would be their first in-person encounter of Trump’s second term.
Trump’s remarks came hours after a White House official said that Putin and Zelenskyy must meet in order for a summit with Trump to occur.
The Kremlin said earlier in the day that a meeting between Trump and Putin had been agreed in principle and would happen in the “coming days.”
“At the suggestion of the American side, an agreement in principle was made to hold a bilateral meeting at the highest level in the coming days,” Putin’s longtime foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov said in an audio statement.
At the same time, Moscow all but dismissed Trump’s proposal for a three-way summit involving Putin and Zelenskyy, continuing the Kremlin’s long-standing resistance to such a sit-down.
The idea of a Trump-Putin-Zelenskyy meeting “for some reason was mentioned by Washington yesterday” but “not specifically discussed,” Ushakov said Thursday. The Russian side had “left this option completely, completely without comment.”
Asked by a reporter in the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon whether Putin needed to meet with the Ukrainian president before sitting down with Trump, the U.S. president said, “No, he doesn’t.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement shortly before Trump’s Oval Office remarks that “the Russians expressed their desire to meet with President Trump, and the President is open to this meeting.”
“President Trump would like to meet with both President Putin and President Zelensky because he wants this brutal war to end,” she said, adding that the White House is “working through the details of these potential meetings and details will be provided at the appropriate time.”
Trump’s efforts to meet with Putin are part of his campaign promise to resolve Russia’s war in Ukraine, and his wider “America First” pledge to end involvement in foreign conflicts altogether.
But Trump — who once said he could end the war in 24 hours — has found the reality more difficult.
On meeting Zelenskyy, Putin said earlier Thursday he had “nothing against it — it is possible — but for this to happen, certain conditions must be created. Unfortunately, such conditions are far away yet,” he added. In the past, he has described Ukraine’s government as illegitimate, saying he would only meet Zelenskyy during the “final” phase of negotiations.
Putin suggested that he could meet with Trump in the United Arab Emirates. Asked about which side proposed the meeting, he added, “Interest was shown on both sides. Who said what first? It is no longer important.”