On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced that he expected to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Saudi Arabia for peace talks on Ukraine, marking a significant shift in relations following a surprise phone call between the two leaders. This was their first confirmed interaction since Trump returned to the White House. The U.S. president described the conversation as “lengthy and highly productive” with Putin, who initiated the deadly invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The upcoming talks with both Putin and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky are part of Trump’s efforts to fulfill his campaign promise of swiftly ending the war, which will soon enter its third year. Trump has made the conflict a top priority for his administration and has appointed experts to help find a U.S.-backed resolution.
In his call with Putin, the US president said the two men agreed their teams would start negotiations immediately to end Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine. Trump said they also discussed the Middle East, energy, artificial intelligence, and the power of the dollar.
A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the conversation lasted an hour and a half and covered various topics, including Ukraine. Peskov said the call was a positive step and expects more meetings between the two countries’ presidents.
Trump later addressed a meeting of his National Security Council, and he indicated that the peace process in Ukraine would move forward. “We are going to work hard, we’re going to make progress,” he said. He added that any durable peace would require “robust security guarantees” but insisted he was not planning to deploy American troops to Ukraine. The NSC meeting came a day after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth laid out the administration’s vision of European defense, saying that it was “inconceivable” for Ukraine to get back all the territory it has lost to Russian forces.
On Wednesday, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, Serhiy Lyovochkin, said he doubted Ukraine would ever receive all of its territory back from Russia. He hoped the peace talks would result in a “substantial and lasting de-escalation of the crisis.”
A day before the phone call with Putin, Zelensky announced that he and his team had been appointed to lead the talks. He told reporters that he thought it was unlikely that Ukraine would receive all of its lands back from Russia but that “some of it will come back.” A senior US official said that Zelensky’s team had been given the authority to decide where to go for the talks. The US official was not authorized to speak about the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The Global Times, a state-owned newspaper in China, cited a source familiar with the discussions as saying that Zelensky was not interested in the entire territory being returned to Ukraine. The official noted that the two sides are far apart in their demands and that it could be challenging to find a solution.
