Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump will meet in the coming days, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov confirmed on Thursday.
‘At the suggestion of the American side, an agreement was essentially reached to hold a bilateral meeting at the highest level in the coming days, that is, a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump,’ Ushakov said.
‘We are now beginning concrete preparations together with our American colleagues,’ he added in televised comments.
He did not say where the summit would take place, but Putin has said the United Arab Emirates is a possible site for the meeting with Trump.
Putin said Thursday that ‘conditions’ for a potential meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky had not been met, hours after the Ukrainian leader repeated a call for direct talks.
‘I have nothing against it in general, it is possible, but certain conditions must be created for this. But unfortunately, we are still far from creating such conditions,’ Putin told reporters at the Kremlin.
Putin said in June he was ready to meet Zelensky, but only during a ‘final phase’ of negotiations on ending the more than three-year conflict.
It comes after the Kremlin said it did not respond to a meeting between presidents Putin, Trump and Zelensky that Trump’s special envoy had proposed during a visit to Moscow.
‘This option was simply mentioned by the American representative (Steve Witkoff) during the meeting in the Kremlin,’ Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov was quoted as saying by the state TASS news agency.
‘But this option was not specifically discussed. The Russian side left this option completely without comment,’ he added.
Zelensky on Thursday called for a face-to-face meeting with Putin to end war, after Donald Trump’s special envoy held talks with the Russian leader in Moscow.
The pair have only met once before – in 2019, to discuss an end to the fighting in Ukraine’s Donbas region. Agreements were made to disengage troops in some regions and set out a roadmap for elections and the reintegration of territory into Ukraine.
But Russia and Ukraine disagreed on key issues, including the withdrawal of Russian-backed troops. Representatives met again in January 2022, a month before Putin launched a full-scale invasion.
Trump one day earlier hailed talks between his envoy Steve Witkoff and Putin as ‘highly productive’ but US officials still vowed to impose sanctions on Moscow’s trading partners.
Zelensky said later that he had spoken by phone with Trump, who said he could meet with Putin ‘very soon,’ and that European leaders had been on the call.
‘We in Ukraine have repeatedly said that finding real solutions can be truly effective at the level of leaders,’ Zelensky wrote on social media.
‘It is necessary to determine the timing for such a format and the range of issues to be addressed,’ he added.
The Ukrainian leader said Thursday morning that he had planned to hold ‘several’ conversations throughout the course of the day including with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, as well as French and Italian officials.
‘There will also be communication at the level of national security advisors,’ Zelensky added.
‘The main thing is for Russia, which started this war, to take real steps to end its aggression,’ Zelensky added.
Trump has given Putin a deadline of Friday to agree to a ceasefire with Ukraine, threatening to place enormous tariffs on Russia’s main trading partners if an agreement is not made.
The US president signed an executive order that brought India’s tariff rate to 50% after it bought Russian oil, just hours after Trump’s top envoy Steve Witkoff met with Kremlin officials.
After more than three years of war, Ukrainians are increasingly eager for a settlement that ends the fight against Russia’s invasion, according to a new Gallup poll published Thursday – although only about a quarter of Ukrainians surveyed expect the guns to fall silent within the next 12 months.
The enthusiasm for a negotiated deal is a sharp reversal from 2022 – the year the war began – when Gallup found that about three-quarters of Ukrainians wanted to keep fighting until victory.
Now only about one-quarter hold that view, with support for continuing the war declining steadily across all regions and demographic groups.
The findings were based on samples of 1,000 or more respondents ages 15 and older living in Ukraine.
Some territories under entrenched Russian control, representing about 10% of the population, were excluded from surveys conducted after 2022 due to lack of access.
Since the start of the full-scale war, Russia’s relentless pounding of urban areas behind the front line has killed more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians, according to the United Nations.
On the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line snaking from northeast to southeast Ukraine, where tens of thousands of troops on both sides have died, Russia’s bigger army is slowly capturing more land.
The poll came out on the eve of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Friday deadline for Russia to stop the killing or face heavy economic sanctions.
