Russian President Vladimir Putin is in the middle of a trip to China, where he has met with several world leaders, but not the one President Donald Trump has repeatedly called on him to have a face-to-face with: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The Russian leader arrived Sunday in the northern city of Tianjin, which was the location of this year’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit. Putin met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Uzbekistani President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, among others.
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The summit brought together the 10 members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and China’s annual celebration commemorating the end of the Sino-Japanese War and World War II is set for Wednesday.
These meetings come as Trump continues his efforts to facilitate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war and simultaneously works through his administration’s tariff policy, particularly toward China. The administration increased the tariff on India, citing its continued purchases of Russian oil, but not on China, and, in doing so, has pushed Modi closer to Xi and Putin.
Trump met with Putin on Aug. 15 in Alaska and then with several European leaders days later at the White House. After the Putin summit, he expressed optimism about a Putin-Zelensky meeting, but Moscow has continued to drag out any possible meeting between them.
Between Putin’s trip to the United States last month and his visit to Beijing, he is finding a much warmer reception on the world stage than he had earlier in the conflict, which has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, if not more than 1 million, over the last 3 1/2 years.
The president expressed doubt to the Daily Caller that a bilateral meeting between Putin and Zelensky would happen, but he shared more optimism about a possible trilateral meeting between them and him.
“A tri would happen,” he said. “A bi, I don’t know about, but a tri will happen. But, you know, sometimes people aren’t ready for it.”
Such a meeting was one of the supposed agreements Trump and Putin had discussed in Alaska.
Trump’s desire to end the Russia-Ukraine war was a key part of his presidential campaign. Through the first eight months of his second term, however, he has made little progress on ending the most devastating war on European soil since World War II.
He has also raised the prospect that the two sides may not be interested in making a deal of any kind yet.
“I use the analogy — I’ve used it a couple of times — you have a child, and there’s another child in the lot, in the playground, and they hate each other, and they start swinging, swinging, and swinging, and you want them to stop, and they keep going,” Trump said. “After a little while, they’re very happy to stop. Do you understand that? It’s almost that way. Sometimes they have to fight for a little bit before you can get them to stop. But this has been going on for a long time. A lot of people are dead.”
The president has shared multiple loose deadlines for progress in these efforts, but his administration has not followed through yet on consequences for missing them.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who was among the European leaders to visit the White House on Aug. 18 after the Trump-Putin summit, said the lack of a bilateral meeting by Monday “means that, once again, President Putin played President Trump.”
While Moscow continues to stall these negotiation efforts led by the Trump administration, Russian forces continue to carry out devastating attacks on Ukrainian cities. Ukraine reported that Russia’s military launched 537 drones and decoys, along with 45 missiles, at Ukraine overnight Saturday. Days earlier, 19 people, including four children, were killed in an attack targeting the capital.
“It is absolutely clear that Moscow used the time meant for preparing a leaders-level meeting to organize new massive attacks,” Zelensky said in a statement on X. “The only way to reopen a window of opportunity for diplomacy is through tough measures against all those bankrolling the Russian army and effective sanctions against Moscow itself – banking and energy sanctions.”
European leaders have fallen in line with Trump’s goal of ending the conflict but are more concerned about making sure it ends on positive terms for Ukraine. European countries have also begun in recent months buying U.S. weapons to send to Ukraine so that the U.S. is not footing the majority of the bill for the West’s support.
Russia occupies about one-fifth of Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean Peninsula, which it annexed in 2014. In public comments, Russian officials have demanded that Ukraine give up not only that land, but also territory that Russian forces have not captured. They have also demanded that Ukraine limit its army’s capabilities and rule out NATO membership, effectively knee-capping them long-term, and said it would not agree to allow NATO forces to deploy to Ukraine.
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Trump has said both sides may have to give up land to get a deal done, but neither side has shown an interest in doing so.
Another major sticking point that is still being hammered out is what security protections the West can give to Ukraine to ensure it is not vulnerable to future Russian aggression. Trump has ruled out putting U.S. forces in Ukraine but has kept open the possibility of U.S. air support.