Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shakes hands with US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House, 18 August 2025. Photo: EPA / AARON SCHWARTZ
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed his readiness to hold bilateral talks with Vladimir Putin following what he described as his “best” meeting yet with US President Donald Trump at the White House on Monday to discuss ending the three-and-a-half-year-long war.
Speaking to reporters outside the White House following a day of high-stakes talks with both the US president and seven European leaders, Zelensky said he had made it clear to Trump that he was “ready for a bilateral meeting with Vladimir Putin”, after which they would expect a trilateral meeting with the US president.
“We are ready for any formats at the level of leaders, because only at the level of leaders can we resolve all those complex, painful issues”, Zelensky said.
Trump, who in a Truth Social post described the talks as “very good” and said that the leaders in attendance were “very happy about the possibility of peace”, confirmed that he had called Putin afterwards to begin the “arrangements for a meeting, at a location to be determined, between President Putin and President Zelensky”, which would then be followed by a trilateral meeting with him.
The Kremlin did not immediately confirm Putin’s participation in any future meetings with Zelensky, but said that the Russian leader had held a “frank and very constructive” call with Trump in which the two men voiced their support for continuing “direct negotiations” between Moscow and Kyiv and discussed the prospect of “raising the level of the representatives” involved in future talks.
Despite fears that Trump would pressure him to accept territorial concessions to Russia in his bid to secure a swift end to the war, Zelensky added that, while he had shown the US president “many things on the map regarding the situation on the battlefield’, the issue of land exchanges had not been discussed and was instead “a question that we will leave between me and Putin”.
Trump also confirmed that the US would help to protect Ukraine from any future Russian invasion by joining Ukraine’s European allies in offering security guarantees, which he added the US would coordinate.
While the US president did not specify how such guarantees would look or what Washington’s role in coordinating them might be, Zelensky hailed the promise as “a big step forward” for the peace process and said they would be “formalised on paper within the next week to 10 days”.
European leaders appeared cautiously optimistic after the meeting, with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer praising what he called the “real sense of unity” between the Europeans and Trump, and French President Emmanuel Macron stressing the importance of US-backed guarantees for the “whole security of the European continent”.
The issue of a ceasefire may remain a contentious one, however, with Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz insisting that a ceasefire remained an important precondition for future talks between Moscow and Kyiv — despite Trump suggesting during his meeting with Zelensky that one would no longer be necessary to secure peace.
