U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are set to meet for summit talks within the next few days, the Kremlin announced on Thursday.
This high-stakes diplomatic engagement comes as the US aggressively pushes for an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine, with President Trump’s deadline for a truce looming just a day away.
The announcement of the impending summit followed a nearly three-hour meeting in the Kremlin on Wednesday between President Putin and Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff. The Kremlin’s foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, told reporters that Russia and the U.S. have already agreed on a venue for the meeting.
“Together with our American colleagues, we are starting to work on specific issues,” Ushakov said, according to the Interfax news service, with the goal for the talks to take place as early as next week. He did not, however, identify the specific location where the summit will be held.
The diplomatic maneuvers are taking place under the shadow of a Friday deadline set by President Trump, who has threatened to hit purchasers of Russian oil with heavy secondary tariffs unless President Putin agrees to a truce in the war, which is now in its fourth year.
President Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with Putin over the lack of progress towards peace and has also threatened to impose similar heavy tariffs on other countries that buy Russian exports, including a potential swipe at China.
“We did it with India. We’re doing it probably with a couple of others. One of them could be China,” he said on Wednesday.
The Zelenskyy factor: a trilateral meeting on the table?
A key element of the U.S. diplomatic push is the idea of a trilateral meeting involving President Putin, President Trump, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Ushakov confirmed that Witkoff had raised this proposal during their talks, though he stated that Russia did not comment on the idea and wants to focus first on the direct Putin-Trump summit.
President Trump himself has been vocal about his intentions.
On Wednesday, he said there was a “very good chance” he would meet with both Putin and Zelenskiy soon in another bid to broker peace between the two warring nations.
According to The New York Times, President Trump informed European leaders during a phone call earlier on Wednesday that he intended to meet with Putin first, and then follow up with a trilateral meeting involving both the Russian and Ukrainian leaders.
He was reportedly positive about the possibility of a ceasefire, and even suggested that Putin would be open to entering into peace talks in exchange for discussing potential land swaps, according to several people with knowledge of the call.
The White House has confirmed the president’s openness to these discussions.
“The Russians expressed their desire to meet with President Trump, and the president is open to meeting with both President Putin and President Zelenskiy,” stated White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
A landmark meeting with historic precedent
This face-to-face meeting would be a landmark event, the first between a sitting US and Russian president since Joe Biden met with President Putin in Geneva in June 2021, just eight months before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In a sign of the deep animosity that has characterized the conflict, President Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy have not met since December 2019 and have made no secret of their mutual contempt.
Following the Wednesday meeting between Putin and Witkoff, which a Kremlin aide described as “useful and constructive,” President Trump claimed in a Truth Social post that “great progress” had been achieved, although he later clarified that he would not yet call it a breakthrough.
The world will now be watching closely to see if this flurry of high-stakes diplomacy can translate into a tangible path towards peace before the sanctions deadline hits.
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