US President Donald Trump. Photo: EPA/ Nathan Howard 

US President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are to meet in person on 15 August in Alaska, Trump announced on his Truth Social website on Friday.

“The highly anticipated meeting between myself, as President of the United States of America, and President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, will take place next Friday, August 15, 2025, in the Great State of Alaska,” Trump wrote, adding simply, “Further details to follow. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Putin aide Yury Ushakov confirmed that the meeting would take place on Friday in Alaska, Russian news agency TASS reported early on Saturday. The choice of the two leaders to meet on US soil was “quite logical”, Ushakov added, noting that Russia and the United States were “close neighbours”, and that the next in-person summit between them could be expected to take place in Russia.

The economic interests of the Russian Federation and the United States overlap in Alaska and the Arctic, and there are prospects for the implementation of large-scale projects, he continued.

Trump and Putin have not met in person since the 2019 G8 summit in the Japanese city of Osaka, but have spoken to each other by phone multiple times in the past year. The decision to hold a summit follows months of Trump attempting without success to bring about the ceasefire in Ukraine he promised “within 24 hours” of taking office during the 2024 election.

One White House official told CBS News that there was a possibility that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky could also attend next week’s meeting, though there has so far been no mention of such a move from Moscow.

In a post on X on Saturday morning, however, Zelensky made no such suggestion, and while he stressed Kyiv’s commitment to a lasting peace deal, and one that would “not collapse because of Moscow’s desires”, he went on to warn that any decisions made without Ukraine would be “decisions against peace”

“They will not achieve anything. These are stillborn decisions. They are unworkable decisions. And we all need real and genuine peace. Peace that people will respect,” Zelensky continued in a second post.

Welcoming news of the meeting on Saturday, the influential head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, called on Moscow and Washington to “partner on environmental protection, infrastructure & energy issues in the Arctic and beyond,” but was notably silent about the prospects of the two leaders making progress towards peace in Ukraine.