After meeting with European leaders and Zelenskyy at the White House on Monday, Trump held a call with Putin and indicated he had made progress toward one of his major goals: orchestrating a three-way meeting between Putin, Zelenskyy and himself.
“I called President Putin, and began the arrangements for a meeting, at a location to be determined, between President Putin and President Zelenskyy,” Trump said in a social media post, adding that after that engagement, he would join the two for trilateral talks.
“This was a very good, early step for a War that has been going on for almost four years,” Trump added.
The Kremlin issued its own readout of the call, saying both Trump and Putin have expressed “support for the continuation of direct negotiations between the Russian and Ukrainian delegations.”
“The idea was discussed that the level of representatives from the Ukrainian and Russian sides should be increased. This refers to the representatives who participate in the aforementioned direct negotiations,” according to a statement issued by a top Putin aide, which made no mention of a one-on-one between Putin and Zelenskyy.
If Trump can indeed convince Putin to meet head-to-head with Zelenskyy, it would be a marker of potential progress — one that has eluded the Trump administration for months.
U.S. officials worked to bring Putin and Zelenskyy together in May for a high-level meeting hosted in Turkey. Putin ultimately did not attend the talks, sending a lower-level delegation of Russian diplomats in his place.
Later that month, the Kremlin also rebuffed an attempt to coordinate a meeting between the leaders at the Vatican.
The Kremlin has also engaged in multiple apparent stall tactics to push off direct engagement with Ukraine, such as insisting that both sides produce a document detailing their conditions for peace and then taking weeks to produce said document—only for it to list the same maximalist demands that Ukraine and the West have repeatedly dismissed.
On Monday, Zelenskyy again expressed a willingness to meet with Putin in a three-way format.
“We are ready for the trilateral meeting,” he said.
-ABC News’ Shannon Kingston
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