Trump had told European leaders that he intended to meet Putin and then follow up shortly afterward by meeting both Putin and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, together.
However, a Kremlin aide said on Thursday that Moscow had not agreed to a three-way meeting.
“That option was simply mentioned by the American representative during the course of conversation at the Kremlin,” Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy aide, told reporters. He said Moscow was “completely without comment” on the idea of a three-way summit and that it had not been discussed “concretely” with Witkoff.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky could be part of the talks.Credit: Getty Images
Hours later, Putin said he was not opposed to meeting Zelensky – a prospect Ukraine’s leader has repeatedly requested – but reiterated that “certain conditions” must be met before such a meeting can take place.
“We are unfortunately, at the moment, far away from those conditions,” Putin said.
Since initiating a rapprochement with the Kremlin in January, the Trump administration had been holding out on agreeing to a summit with Putin, looking for a sign from the Kremlin that the Russian leader was, in fact, serious about a real ceasefire on the battlefield.
The White House’s sudden commitment to hold a summit has raised questions about what, if anything, Putin agreed to on Wednesday during his talks in Moscow with Witkoff.
‘Putin doesn’t keep a preprepared plan. He lives for today. He knows what he wants to get in the end.’
Tatiana Stanovaya, Carnegie Moscow Eurasia Centre
Exactly what the two men discussed is unclear. Ushakov told reporters on Wednesday that Putin had conveyed certain “signals” to Witkoff on Ukraine, but the Kremlin aide did not go into detail.
One possibility is that Putin signalled more flexibility on the issue of how land could be divided up or traded in any settlement between Russia and Ukraine.
For months, Russian envoys have insisted in talks with US counterparts that Moscow be given the entirety of the four regions that the Kremlin claimed to have “annexed” from Ukraine in late 2022 even though vast swaths of the territory remained under Ukrainian control. US negotiators viewed that position as unreasonable and saw it as a sign that Moscow wasn’t serious about negotiating an end to the war.
Some analysts suggested Putin had told envoys during talks this year to stick only to the hardest-line position, in order to force a meeting between him and Trump. Russian officials may be hoping that a one-on-one summit will give Putin an opportunity to sway Trump, long sympathetic to Russia, back to supporting the Russian leader’s views on what he calls “the root causes of the conflict”.
People close to the Kremlin, as well as political analysts, say Putin’s demands – to exclude Ukraine from NATO, limit Ukrainian military capabilities and lay the groundwork for a more Moscow-friendly government in Ukraine – are more crucial to him than the specifics of what territory Russia ultimately controls.
“The most important thing for Putin is NATO and these ironclad guarantees that Ukraine will not be in NATO and that NATO countries will not develop a military presence inside Ukraine, plus a set of political demands on Ukraine itself,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Eurasia Centre. Other demands, she added, might be open to negotiation.
Moscow has not formally demarcated the borders of the four “annexed” regions, which Stanovaya said suggested there had always been some flexibility on the land issue. She didn’t exclude the possibility that Russia would be open to exchanging certain territories.
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Some analysts believe Russian-controlled land in regions of Ukraine that Moscow has not “annexed” would be most likely to be offered for exchange in negotiations.
Russia holds 1719 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory in the regions of Kharkiv and Sumy – neither of which has been “annexed” by Russia – according to DeepState, a Ukrainian group that maps the conflict using combat footage.
But Putin “doesn’t keep a preprepared plan”, Stanovaya said. “He lives for today. He knows what he wants to get in the end.”
In this case, she said, what Russia’s leader wants is for Ukraine to stop being what he sees as an “anti-Russia project” and to return to Moscow’s sphere of influence.
“So, either he achieves this through NATO guarantees, that is, guarantees from the West, or he achieves this through political control within Ukraine,” Stanovaya said. “One or the other, or both. Then, we’ll see how it goes. Territory is very secondary.”
‘We could fight some more’
There is little indication that, despite increasing threats from the White House, Putin has abandoned his hard-line goals.
Russian forces have the advantage on the battlefield, so a decision by Putin to settle rather than try to conquer more of Ukraine should be seen as a concession in itself, said Feodor Voitolovsky, director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, a Russian government-funded research group.
A destroyed Ukrainian Army tank T-64BV in the Kursk region of Russia after it was taken back by Russian troops.Credit: AP
“We could fight some more, wait a few more months and achieve even greater, more serious results on the battlefield,” said Voitolovsky who serves on advisory boards at the Russian Foreign Ministry and Security Council.
But while Russian forces have been advancing in Ukraine since launching a summer offensive, they have suffered significant losses and are far from seizing the entirety of the four “annexed” regions.
Stanovaya said Putin would prefer the capitulation of Zelensky, under pressure from Trump, so Russian forces can stop fighting. But the logic of Russia’s leader, she said, is “we will get what we want at any cost”, regardless of the economic or societal toll.
