Donald Trump intends to leave Russia and Ukraine to organize a meeting between their leaders without directly playing a role for now, according to administration officials familiar with the situation, taking a step back from the negotiations to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The next stage in Trump’s eyes to end the war in Ukraine remains a bilateral meeting between Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, the officials said.
Trump has told advisers in recent days that he intends to host a trilateral meeting with the two leaders only after they have met first, although whether that initial conference takes place remains unclear and Trump does not intend to become involved in that effort.
In a phone interview with talk show host Mark Levin on WABC on Tuesday, Trump also said he thought it would be better for Putin and Zelenskyy to meet without him in the first instance. “I just want to see what happens at the meeting. So they’re in the process of setting it up and we’re going to see what happens.”
Trump’s reluctance to push Putin and Zelenskyy to a meeting comes as he has acknowledged in recent days that ending the war in Ukraine has been more difficult than he had anticipated, after saying on the campaign trail last year he could achieve it in 24 hours.
He has since sought a quick peace agreement after his deadline for Russia to end the war expired this month and said after his meetings with Zelenskyy and European leaders at the White House on Monday that he had initiated steps for a bilateral meeting.
A senior administration official characterized the situation as Trump taking a “wait-and-see approach” to whether a Putin-Zelenskyy meeting could be scheduled. But there have been few tangible signs in recent days of progress and the White House does not have a shortlist of locations where the meeting could take place.
The White House said in a statement that “Trump and his national security team continue to engage with Russian and Ukranian officials towards a bilateral meeting to stop the killing and end the war… It is not in the national interest to further negotiate these issues publicly.”
After the meetings at the White House, Trump spoke to Putin on a call that lasted around 40 minutes. Putin’s foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, later said the two leaders agreed that more senior negotiators would be appointed for direct talks between Russia and Ukraine.
That statement signaled that a bilateral meeting could remain some way off, even as the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, expressed optimism it could happen within two weeks and Putin has rejected previous attempts by Zelenskyy to meet face-to-face since the start of the war.
At a news conference on Monday night after the White House meetings, Zelenskyy said that the European leaders’ meeting with Trump centered on security guarantees for Ukraine in any peace agreement to ensure Russia did not resume its invasion.
Trump offered to contribute to security guarantees, but has since ruled out deploying American troops to be part of a military force on the ground in Ukraine. Any US assistance is expected to come in the form of intelligence sharing or possibly US air support.
Previously, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, had said on CNN’s “state of the union” after the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska that Putin agreed the US could offer Ukraine a security guarantee that resembled Nato’s Article 5 collective self-defense mandate.
“We were able to win the following concession: that the United States could offer Article 5-like protection, which is one of the real reasons why Ukraine wants to be in Nato,” Witkoff said.
But Putin’s acceptance of Nato-like security guarantees may not be as straightforward. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, has also suggested that Russia should be one of the security guarantors for Ukraine – a proposal the White House has privately scoffed at, one official said.
“The Ukrainian side proposed, and our delegation at that time agreed, to work out security guarantees that would involve all permanent members of the UN security council – that is, Russia, the People’s Republic of China, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom,” Lavrov said.
After the White House meetings, Zelenskyy also outlined a plan to purchase $90bn in American weapons through Europe to win security guarantees, and for the US to buy drones from Ukraine. It was not immediately clear whether that was part of the Ukraine weapons deal Trump announced last month.
