Washington: President Donald Trump is set to host Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for talks at the White House Friday, with the US leader signalling he’s not ready to agree to sell Kyiv a long-range missile system that the Ukrainians say they desperately need.
Zelenskyy gets his one-on-one with Trump a day after the US president and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a lengthy phone call to discuss the conflict.
In recent days, Trump has shown openness to selling Ukraine long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, even as Putin warned that such a move would further strain the US-Russian relationship.
But following Thursday’s call with Putin, Trump appeared to downplay the prospects of Ukraine getting the missiles, which have a range of about 1,600 km.
“We need Tomahawks for the United States of America, too,” Trump said. “We have a lot of them, but we need them. I mean, we can’t deplete our country.”
Zelenskyy had been seeking the weapons that would allow Ukrainian forces to strike deep into Russian territory and target key military sites, energy facilities and critical infrastructure. Zelenskyy has argued such strikes would help compel Putin to take Trump’s calls for direct negotiations to end the war more seriously.
But Putin warned Trump during the call that supplying Kyiv with the Tomahawks “won’t change the situation on the battlefield, but would cause substantial damage to the relationship between our countries,” according to Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser.
It will be the fourth face-to-face meeting for Trump and Zelenskyy since the Republican returned to office in January, and their second in less than a month.
Trump announced following Thursday’s call with Putin that he would soon meet with the Russian leader in Budapest, Hungary, to discuss ways to end the war. The two also agreed that their senior aides, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, would meet next week at an unspecified location.
Fresh off brokering a ceasefire and hostage agreement between Israel and Hamas, Trump has said finding an endgame to the war in Ukraine is now his top foreign policy priority and has expressed new confidence about the prospects of getting it done.
Ahead of his call with Putin, Trump had shown signs of increased frustration with the Russian leader.
Last month, he announced that he believed Ukraine could win back all territory lost to Russia, a dramatic shift from the US leader’s repeated calls for Kyiv to make concessions to end the war.
Trump, going back to his 2024 campaign, insisted he would quickly end the war, but his peace efforts appeared to stall following a diplomatic blitz in August, when he held a summit with Putin in Alaska and a White House meeting with Zelenskyy and European allies.
Trump emerged from those meetings certain he was on track to arrange direct talks between Zelenskyy and Putin. But the Russian leader hasn’t shown any interest in meeting with Zelenskyy, and Moscow has only intensified its bombardment of Ukraine.
Trump, for his part, offered a notably more neutral tone about Ukraine following what he described as a “very productive call with Putin.
He also hinted that negotiations between Putin and Zelenskyy might have to be conducted indirectly.
“They don’t get along too well, those two,” Trump said.
