Ambitious plans for a bilateral summit between Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia’s Vladimir Putin appear to be stalling, only days after Donald Trump expressed confidence that such a meeting could take place within weeks.
Locations from Geneva and Vienna to Budapest or Istanbul have all been mooted as possible venues. Putin and Zelensky have not been in the same room since 2019, three years before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The US president said he had “begun arrangements” for the summit, indicating he believed Putin had agreed to it over the phone on Monday.
This may have been an optimistic reading of the conversation.
Almost at once, the Kremlin shared its own, more vague version of the exchange. Trump and Putin had discussed “the possibility of raising the level of representatives” – said aide Yuri Ushakov – and that could simply mean that ministers, instead of envoys, may take part in the talks.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that a meeting could happen “within the next two weeks”. But, he cautioned, “we don’t know whether the Russian president will have the courage to attend such a summit” and he pushed for Putin to be “persuaded”.
Trump mentioned a “rough” situation for Russia, should Putin not co-operate in the peace process, but declined to be more specific.
Now, as the diplomatic whirlwind dies down, the likelihood of a meeting between Putin and Zelensky seems to be further diminishing.
On the surface, Moscow appears to be open to taking part in bilateral talks between the two presidents. In reality, though, the preconditions it is attaching to a meeting will almost certainly prove unacceptable to the Ukrainian side.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said this week that Putin was ready to meet Zelensky provided that all “issues” that required consideration “at the highest level” were worked out. This vague yet uncompromising language has been used by the Kremlin in the past to resist Ukrainian proposals for a bilateral meeting.
Last week Trump envoy Steve Witkoff said that Russia had accepted security guarantees for Ukraine, calling it “a very significant step”.