US President Donald Trump has urged the leaders of Ukraine and Russia to show “flexibility” in organising a bilateral meeting to get a peace deal over the line.
The American leader also said the US might provide air power as part of a security guarantee for Ukraine − a significant step forward for Kyiv agreeing to a deal.
But first, President Trump insisted, there must be a meeting between Russia's President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to kick-start the peace process, amid concerns that the Russian leader will not agree to a bilateral meeting.
“I hope President Putin is going to be good, and if he’s not, it’s going to be a rough situation,” Mr Trump told Fox News on Tuesday. “I hope that President Zelenskyy will do what he has to do. He has to show some flexibility also.”
In recent days there has been a whirlwind round of diplomacy instigated by Mr Trump, from a summit with Mr Putin in Alaska on Friday followed by talks with Mr Zelenskyy and European leaders in the White House on Monday.
Key now is to organise a face-to-face between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders, followed by a trilateral to include Mr Trump.
But Russia experts have suggested that Mr Putin is highly unlikely to accept a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart.
Mr Putin will “absolutely rule out” a meeting, said Nigel Gould-Davies, a Russia expert at the London-headquartered International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank.
“He has made very clear that Zelenskyy is no longer a legitimate president of Ukraine,” he said, adding that it was a “very smart move by Zelenskyy to get Trump's acceptance” of the bilateral meeting idea.
“Because ultimately, I think his hope will be that when, as I expect, Putin rejects that proposal for such a trilateral meeting, it will once again impress on Trump that it is Putin and no one else who is the obstacle to peace,” said Mr Gould-Davies.
During a phone call with Mr Putin on Monday, Mr Trump urged him to begin making plans for a bilateral summit with Mr Zelensky, that would mark the first time the two leaders have met since Russia’s 2022 invasion.
“I wouldn’t say they are ever going to be best friends … they’re the ones that have to call the shots,” he said.
Mr Trump agreed that if the bilateral went well he would look to follow it up with a trilateral summit.
“We’re going to find out about President Putin in the next couple of weeks − that I can tell you − and we’re going to see where it all goes. It’s possible that he doesn’t want to make a deal,” added the US President.
The German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told reporters in Washington on Monday that the bilateral could happen within two weeks while French President Emmanuel Macron signalled that the trilateral summit could be within three weeks.
Key to any deal will be security guarantees for Ukraine to ensure that Russia does not invade again, as it did so in 2014 and 2022.
Importantly Mr Trump indicated on Tuesday that there would be some form of security assurances, potentially in the form of air support from the US.
“We’re willing to help them with things, especially, probably you could talk about by air, because there’s nobody that has the kind of stuff we have,” he said.
But Michael Carpenter, who was a special assistant to former president Joe Biden, said the only real security guarantee was Nato membership for Ukraine “and obviously, that's anathema to Putin”.
A package of security guarantees is being examined that could build on the work of the so-called “coalition of the willing”, a European group led by the UK and France, potentially including a multinational force.
Mr Carpenter, a senior fellow at IISS, added that if the US agreed “to seize those €300 billion ($350 billion) of frozen Russian assets that would be a game changer, that would provide a real exogenous shock to the Russian economy”.
Mr Trump also made clear that Mr Zelenskyy would have to forfeit his ambitions of retaking Crimea, which Russia illegally seized in 2014.
“Both of those things are impossible,” the US President said, referring to the Crimean Peninsula and Nato membership for Ukraine.
