Russia won’t commit to Putin-Zelensky meeting

Desmond Milligan · August 19

Russia is refusing to commit to a meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which President Trump has encouraged as a next step toward ending the war between their two countries.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov argued Tuesday that any summit between the leaders should be prepared “step by step, gradually, starting from the expert level and then going through all the necessary stages.”

Lavrov, who attended last week’s summit between Trump and Putin in Alaska, made the remarks in an interview with state-run television Rossiya-24.

The foreign minister said the Kremlin is not turning down negotiations with Ukraine and added that the U.S. president has the invitation from Moscow to visit Russia. Trump was accompanied by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff in Anchorage.

Trump spoke with Putin on Monday from the White House, calling the Russian leader as he was hosting Zelensky along with seven European leaders, including the secretary-general of NATO, in Washington. The European officials and Zelensky were not in the room when Trump called Putin.

“I didn’t do it in front of them — I thought that would be disrespectful to President Putin. I wouldn’t do that, because they have not had the warmest relations,” Trump said Tuesday while on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends.”

The conversation between the U.S. president and Putin lasted around 40 minutes, with Trump saying the call was “good” and that he told the Russian leader that “we’re going to set up a meeting with President Zelensky, and you and he will meet.”

“And then after that meeting, if everything works out OK, I’ll meet and we’ll wrap it up,” the president added.

Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, said on Tuesday that Trump and the Kremlin head had a “quite frank and constructive” conversation, discussing the “prospect of exploring opportunities for drawing higher-ranking officials from both Ukraine and Russia into these direct talks.

Trump, who has been pushing to end the three-and-a-half-year Russia-Ukraine conflict, has floated providing air support for Ukraine as part of security guarantees. The president said Washington will assist Europe in forming security guarantees for Kyiv to fortify the potential peace treaty between Russia and Ukraine.

“We’re willing to help them with things, especially, probably, if you talk about by air because nobody has stuff we have,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News.

The president has instructed his national security team to “come up with a framework for these security guarantees that can be acceptable to help ensure a lasting peace and end this war,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters during Tuesday’s press briefing.

“I won’t, certainly, rule out anything as far as military options that the president has at his disposal, I’ll let him do that,” she said, adding that Trump has “definitively” ruled out U.S. service members being on the ground in Ukraine.

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