If President Donald Trump’s long-anticipated meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin goes well, the two might extend their trip to Alaska to establish a peace deal with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“I’m more interested in an immediate peace deal — getting peace fast,” Trump told Fox Radio host Brian Kilmeade. “Depending on what happens with my meeting, I’m going to be calling up President Zelensky, and let’s get him over to wherever we’re going to meet.”
The summit will take place Friday at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson outside Anchorage starting at 11:30 a.m. local time. Regardless of how the meeting goes, Trump is expected to hold a press conference.
“I’m going to go there, and I’m representing a lot of people, and especially people that are being killed unnecessarily, like 5-7,000 soldiers a week. They’re not Americans, but they’re lives, they’re souls,” Trump said. “And if I can stop something, I’ve stopped six wars this year. This was going to be one of my easy ones, but it never works out that way. This turns out to be probably the most difficult.”
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at the press conference that though the president has many options, he will focus on diplomacy and negotiation.
“Certainly, the president has plenty of tools at his disposal that he could use if necessary,” Leavitt said. “But he has always said that diplomacy and negotiation is his primary way of hoping to end this war — so that’s what he’ll be looking to do tomorrow.”
Leavitt said Trump “wants to exhaust all options to try to bring this war to a peaceful resolution.”
“He wants to sit down and look the Russian president in the eye and see what progress can be made to move the ball forward to end this brutal war,” she said.
The options in the president’s arsenal that Leavitt referenced likely refer to economic measures that the Biden administration and the European Union left on the table to pressure Russia, according to Trump’s former deputy national security adviser, Victoria Coates.
Trump could “include waivers for Russian energy exports, elements in the Russian financial sector that have remained free from sanctions, and importers of Russian energy—including major European allies—who have not been penalized,” said Coates, who now serves as vice president at The Heritage Foundation’s Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy.
“If President Trump gets serious about this he will get the attention of everyone—including China, which is the single biggest importer of Russian energy,” Coates added.
Trump said if the meeting goes well, he would consider staying longer in Alaska to meet with Zelensky, but if not, he will return to Washington.
“I don’t know where we’re going to have the second meeting, but we have an idea of three different locations and we’ll be including the possibility, because it would be by far the easiest, of staying in Alaska,” he said.
“If it’s a bad meeting, I’m not calling anybody,” he added. “I’m going home.”
Trump has said the deal making will be up to the Ukrainian and Russia leaders, not him.
“I’m not going to make a deal. It’s not up to me to make a deal,” he said. “I think a deal should be made for both [Putin and Zelenskyy].
Putin said last week he wasn’t against meeting Zelenskyy, “but certain conditions need to be created” and were “still a long way off.”
Prior to the summit in Russia, Zelenskyy went to Berlin for virtual meetings with Trump and European leaders.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Trump was “very clear” on Wednesday that he wants to obtain a ceasefire. Macron said Trump agreed Ukraine should be involved in any talks on territory.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz, at a post-call news conference with Zelensky, called the European meeting “constructive” and said they were all “very much in agreement.”
The meeting marks Putin’s first trip to the United States since 2015 for the U.N. General Assembly in New York.