Ambitious plans for a bilateral summit between Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia’s Vladimir Putin appear to be stalling, only days after Donald Trump expressed confidence that such a meeting could take place within weeks.
Locations from Geneva and Vienna to Budapest or Istanbul have all been mooted as possible venues. Putin and Zelensky have not been in the same room since 2019, three years before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The US president said he had “begun arrangements” for the summit, indicating he believed Putin had agreed to it over the phone on Monday.
This may have been an optimistic reading of the conversation.
Almost at once, the Kremlin shared its own, more vague version of the exchange. Trump and Putin had discussed “the possibility of raising the level of representatives” – said aide Yuri Ushakov – and that could simply mean that ministers, instead of envoys, may take part in the talks.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that a meeting could happen “within the next two weeks”. But, he cautioned, “we don’t know whether the Russian president will have the courage to attend such a summit” and he pushed for Putin to be “persuaded”.
Trump mentioned a “rough” situation for Russia, should Putin not co-operate in the peace process, but declined to be more specific.
Now, as the diplomatic whirlwind dies down, the likelihood of a meeting between Putin and Zelensky seems to be further diminishing.
On the surface, Moscow appears to be open to taking part in bilateral talks between the two presidents. In reality, though, the preconditions it is attaching to a meeting will almost certainly prove unacceptable to the Ukrainian side.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said this week that Putin was ready to meet Zelensky provided that all “issues” that required consideration “at the highest level” were worked out. This vague yet uncompromising language has been used by the Kremlin in the past to resist Ukrainian proposals for a bilateral meeting.
Last week Trump envoy Steve Witkoff said that Russia had accepted security guarantees for Ukraine, calling it “a very significant step”.
But it now appears that the guarantees in question would be modelled on those first floated by Moscow and rejected by Kyiv in 2022, which would see Russia join a group of countries wielding a power of veto over military intervention in defence of Ukraine.
That proposal would also see a ban on Western troops being stationed in Ukraine, effectively leaving it defenceless in the event of a fresh Russian invasion. Lavrov said on Thursday that any other security framework would be “an absolutely futile undertaking”.
Zelensky, meanwhile, has said any meeting with Putin would need to come after Kyiv’s allies agreed on security guarantees – which would undoubtedly involve the support of Western forces and exclude Russia, making it the kind that Moscow would never accept.
As things stand, neither Russia nor Ukraine seem ready to budge from their long-held positions – and each is accusing the other of undermining efforts to reach a peace deal.
The possibility of a Putin-Zelensky summit may for the moment seem remote, but that has not stopped speculation about where it might take place.
In the aftermath of the diplomatic frenzy that followed the talks at the White House, Budapest was mentioned as a location for a potential meeting and the Americans were said to be in favour of it.
“They can come to Hungary at any time,” said Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Sizjjarto. “Give us an hour’s notice beforehand, and we are ready to guarantee fair, decent, safe, and equal conditions for everyone in Hungary.”
But not everybody sees the Hungarian capital as sufficiently neutral ground. Prime Minister Viktor Orban is one of the few European leaders who has maintained ties with Putin. He has also blocked funding for Ukraine and has pledged to veto Ukrainian membership to the EU.
“Let’s be honest, Budapest did not support us,” Zelensky said on Thursday. “I’m not saying that Orban’s policy was against Ukraine, but it was against supporting Ukraine,” he told reporters, adding that holding talks in Budapest would be “challenging”.
On Wednesday Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk posted on X that he was opposed to Budapest hosting talks. The city was the location of a 1994 summit that resulted in Kyiv surrendering its share of the Soviet nuclear arsenal in return for Russian security assurances. Those were later rendered meaningless by Moscow’s illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea and its 2022 full-scale invasion.
“Maybe I’m superstitious, but this time I would try to find another place,” quipped Tusk.
France’s Emmanuel Macron raised the possibility of the summit being held in Switzerland – a militarily neutral European country with a long history of hosting high-stakes talks. Zelensky also mooted Vienna, the seat of several international organisations.
In 2023 the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for Putin alleging war crimes in Ukraine but Switzerland and Austria – both ICC signatories – have said they would grant immunity to the Russian president if he came for peace talks.
Turkey too has been floated as an option.
There is a precedent, as Istanbul has already hosted three rounds of direct delegation-level talks between Ukraine and Russia since April, although they failed to result in any meaningful progress towards a ceasefire beyond an agreement on exchanging prisoners of war.
The Vatican and Saudi Arabia were also mentioned by Ukraine as possible locations. The Vatican has long put itself forward as a suitable venue, while Saudi Arabia has previously brokered prisoner exchanges between Kyiv and Moscow.
Away from high-level diplomacy, the war shows no sign of abating.
On Thursday Ukraine said its armed forces had struck an oil refinery in Russia’s Rostov region, which borders Ukraine’s eastern regions of the Donbas.
Russia, meanwhile, launched its biggest wave of strikes on Ukraine for weeks, killing one person and wounding many more.
“There is still no signal from Moscow that they are truly going to engage in meaningful negotiations and end this war,” Zelensky said on social media. “Pressure is needed.”
