US President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he would meet again with Russia’s Vladimir Putin to try to end the war in Ukraine. No date has been set, but Trump wrote on social media that the meeting would take place in Budapest, Hungary.
“I think great progress has been made through today’s phone conversation,” Trump wrote after speaking with Putin. They had already met in Alaska in August, but did not result in a diplomatic breakthrough.
Ahead of Trump’s meeting with Putin, U.S. officials, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, will meet with Russian representatives next week. It is not clear where this meeting will take place.
Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign affairs adviser, said the Russian president made the appeal, which he called “very frank and confident.”
He added that Putin stressed to Trump that the sale of long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, a topic the US president has publicly discussed, “would cause significant damage to relations between our countries.”
The call comes ahead of Trump’s meeting Friday at the White House with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian leader pressured Trump to sell the missiles to kyiv, which would allow Ukrainian forces to strike deeper into Russian territory.
Zelensky said such strikes would help Putin take more seriously Trump’s calls for direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine to end the war.
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