President Donald Trump held a call Thursday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, one day before his scheduled White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday. Zelenskyy’s visit to Washington comes as Trump considers whether to authorize the transfer of Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine — a move that would significantly expand U.S. support for Kyiv. The long-range missiles could enable Ukraine to strike targets deep inside Russian territory.
After the call, Trump announced in a post on Truth Social that he plans to meet Putin in Budapest, Hungary, for a second round of direct discussions aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. A date for the meeting was unclear.
Trump described his phone conversation with Putin as “very productive,” adding that he believed “great progress was made with today’s telephone conversation.” According to the President, he and Putin “agreed that there will be a meeting of our High Level Advisors, next week,” though the exact venue for those talks has not yet been finalized. He said the U.S. delegation would be headed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, after which he and Putin would hold a face-to-face meeting. Trump wrote: “President Putin and I will then meet in an agreed upon location, Budapest, Hungary, to see if we can bring this ‘inglorious’ War, between Russia and Ukraine, to an end.”
Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev reposted Trump’s statement on X and referred to the planned meeting as both “positive” and “important for the world.” In another post, Dmitriev accused “warmongers” from the United Kingdom and European Union of working “very very hard to derail peace prospects” (though he did not provide evidence to support the claim), and added that “dialogue and peace and the US-Russia cooperation will prevail.”
The upcoming meeting between the U.S. and Russian presidents would mark the second time Trump and Putin have met to discuss a potential resolution to the war. Their first summit, held in Alaska in August, stretched nearly three hours but failed to produce any tangible progress toward peace.
Trump’s outreach to both the Russian and Ukrainian leaders follows another major diplomatic breakthrough: a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, which came after both sides accepted a U.S.-brokered peace plan. That agreement led to a cessation of hostilities in Gaza and the release of all surviving hostages and Palestinian prisoners. In his Truth Social post, Trump wrote that he believes “that the Success in the Middle East will help in our negotiation in attaining an end to the War with Russia/Ukraine.”
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