US President Donald Trump says he will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on August 15 to discuss the war in Ukraine.
It will be the first summit of US and Russian presidents since Putin and then-President Joe Biden met in Geneva in June 2021 about six months before relations between Moscow and Washington ruptured when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Speaking to reporters at the White House on August 8 after signing a peace agreement with the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia, Trump said a deal to stop the fighting between Ukraine and Russia is “getting very close.”
He suggested that his meeting with the Russian leader could come before a sit-down discussion involving Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“We’re going to have a meeting with Russia, start off with Russia,” he told reporters.
“And we’ll announce a location. I think the location will be a very popular one,” Trump said, adding that he didn’t want an announcement on talks with Russia to overshadow the importance of the Armenia-Azerbaijan agreement.
Trump later announced Anchorage, Alaska, as the meeting location in a post on social meeting and said more details would follow.
Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yury Ushakov confirmed the meeting.
“Russia and the United States are close neighbours, bordering each other,” Ushakov said, according to TASS. “It seems quite logical that our delegation should simply fly across the Bering Strait and that such an important and eagerly awaited summit between the leaders of the two countries should be held in Alaska.”
Zelenskyy is not scheduled to attend, but a meeting to include Zelenskyy is expected at some point in the future, US media reported, quoting sources. Trump also previously agreed to meet with Putin even if the Russian leader would not meet with Zelenskyy.
Trump gave some clues about a deal to end the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, saying it will involve some exchange of territories.
“It’s very complicated but we are going to get some [territory] back. Some switched. There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both,” Trump said.
Zelenskyy has to get “everything he needs because he has to get ready to sign something and I think he’s working hard to get that done.”
Trump last month set August 8 as the deadline for Putin to agree to a cease-fire or Russia would face severe tariffs targeting its oil and other exports, and its trading partners, namely China and India, could face secondary tariffs on oil purchased from Russia.
Trump on August 6 signed an executive order imposing an additional 25 percent tariff on India but did not raise tariffs on China.
Trump said it was possible that move had been an important development in getting the Putin-Trump summit planned. Another factor that had an impact was NATO “stepped up in terms of buying military equipment,” he said.
Ushakov on August 7 said preparations for the meeting had begun.
“At the suggestion of the American side, an agreement has been reached in principle to hold a bilateral summit in the coming days,” Ushakov was quoted as saying by Russian state news agencies.
Ushakov’s comments came after Trump said a day earlier the meeting between US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Putin “made a lot of progress” and that he might meet with Putin soon.
The Russian leader has long insisted that Ukraine relinquish the territories Russia occupies — including Crimea, which Russia annexed illegally in 2014 — that Western nations stop supplying Ukraine with weapons, and that Ukraine be excluded from NATO membership.
Zelenskyy and his European allies have rejected those demands, though Zelenskyy has expressed openness to meeting with Putin.
