Why a Putin-Zelenskyy meeting matters — and why it might not happen

LONDON — The presidents of Ukraine and Russia “have not been exactly best friends,” U.S. President Donald Trump said earlier this week, as he pushed for an in-person meeting that he says he hopes will lay the groundwork for an end to Moscow’s three-and-a-half-year-old invasion of Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin last met in 2019, for ill-fated negotiations on ending the simmering conflict sparked by Russia’s seizure of Crimea and fomentation of a separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

The 2019 meeting, which occurred shortly after Zelenskyy won power on a populist wave, ended with commitments to implement “all necessary ceasefire support measures” before the end of that year and to release all prisoners of war.

Trump’s seemingly tongue-in-cheek evaluation of the strained relationship between the two leaders belies the toxic effect of more than a decade of Russian aggression against its neighbor.

And while the U.S. president has suggested the proposed sit-down is the key result of his own recent meetings with Putin and Zelenskyy, it is still far from certain Putin will actually do it, despite the White House’s insistence he has agreed.

Nearly six years on from their last meeting, Putin and Zelenskyy are locked in a war that both seem to consider existential. Trump’s return to office has revived dormant peace efforts, but the warring parties are still far apart on key issues.

Simply getting the two presidents in a room together would be a major achievement, but — with hundreds of thousands dead and the futures of both countries on the line — might not produce a positive result.

Nonetheless, the White House has suggested that a bilateral meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin might help bridge the gulf. Trump appears positive fresh off a summit with Putin in Alaska on Friday, followed by White House meetings with Zelenskyy and a group of European leaders on Monday.

“I hope President Putin is going to be good, and if he’s not, it’s going to be a rough situation,” Trump said on Tuesday. “And I hope that Zelenskyy, President Zelenskyy, will do what he has to do. He has to show some flexibility also,” Trump added.

Despite Trump’s positivity, the meeting is far from guaranteed. Putin has repeatedly refused to meet with Zelenskyy during the conflict, having consistently sought to undermine the Ukrainian president’s legitimacy. Russian officials rarely use Zelenskyy’s name, preferring to refer to “the Kyiv regime.”

Moscow is even accused by Ukraine of having dispatched kill teams to target Zelenskyy during the opening weeks of the 2022 invasion. Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Zelenskyy survived more than a dozen assassination attempts in the first year of the full-scale invasion.

Russian officials have been far from effusive in their comments on the proposed bilateral meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy — and the trilateral meeting involving Trump that the U.S. president has proposed as a follow-on.

“We are not rejecting any forms of work — neither bilateral nor trilateral,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday, as quoted by the state-run Tass news agency.

Any meeting should be prepared “step by step, gradually, starting from the expert level and then going through all the necessary stages in order to prepare the summits,” Lavrov reportedly added.

“That gives a lot of room for speculation,” Boris Bondarev — who worked for the Russian permanent mission to the United Nations Office in Geneva until he resigned in 2022 in opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine — told ABC News of the official Russian statements.

“Western diplomacy first says out loud what they’re going to do, so their opponent is ready,” he added. “Russians would never do such a thing.”

The absence of Kremlin confirmation has been interpreted by some in Ukraine as a sign that Putin will not agree to meeting Zelenskyy.

A source close to the Ukrainian government, who requested anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly, told ABC News that the Ukrainians “continue to be very, very skeptical — that’s an understatement — of Putin and the Russians in terms of whether they will move forward.”

“Because the track record is that Putin has said ‘no’ to everything,” the source added. “So, there is skepticism that he will agree to this. But they’ve done their part right. They’ve said ‘yes’ to everything, they’ve been constructive, they’ve demonstrated to Trump that they truly want to get to peace. And again, they feel that Trump sees that and understands that.”

Oleksandr Merezhko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament and the chair of the body’s foreign affairs committee, told ABC News, “I doubt that Putin will agree to meet with Zelenskyy,”

“Putin is afraid of Zelenskyy,” he added. “He understands that the picture will look like an old dictator, war criminal on the one hand, and a young and brave democratic war leader on the other hand.”

“To avoid a trilateral meeting, Putin will be putting forward different absurd demands,” Merezhko said. “He might insist on elections in Ukraine or something. Most likely it will be shuttle diplomacy at the level of ministers of foreign affairs.”

The source close to the government said many pitfalls remain.

“It could be that maybe we’re all wrong and Putin accepts the meeting, but maintains unacceptable demands in terms of what security guarantees are,” they said.

“There are so many potential Russian ‘no’s along the way, even if they satisfy Trump with this meeting,” they added.

Oleg Ignatov, the Crisis Group think tank’s senior analyst for Russia, told ABC News he believes a meeting between the two leaders is possible, but that it won’t be easy to pull off.

“I don’t think it’s a problem for Putin,” Ignatov said.

“He said that Zelenskyy, from his point of view, is not a legitimate leader,” Ignatov continued. “It doesn’t mean that they can’t negotiate with Zelenskyy. The problem could be with signing any documents.”

The proposed meeting does not yet even have a location. Among the possible venues touted so far are Switzerland — suggested by French President Emmanuel Macron — and the Hungarian capital Budapest, suggested by Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto. Putin even reportedly offered Moscow as a venue.

If a meeting does go ahead, the location will be subject to major logistical and security preparations, while diplomatic teams work on the strategy and documents to underpin the negotiations.

“With normal preparations we talk about months,” Ignatov said. “We are not in a normal situation. Maybe if Trump pushes, [Putin] may agree, but it doesn’t mean that they succeed.”

The chasm between the Ukrainian and Russian camps on key issues — prime among them territorial questions and the shape of post-war Western security guarantees for Ukraine — remains.

The peace memorandums drafted by Kyiv and Moscow earlier this year “are too different, and we haven’t seen any other texts,” Ignatov said.

Putin’s 2021 screed — “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians” — set out the ideological foundations of his war in Ukraine.

The country, he asserted, is an “artificial” nation, with its people forcibly split from the collective descendants of the first eastern Slavic state — the late 9th century Kyivan Rus — by internal radicals and foreign meddling. Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, Putin claimed, together form a single “triune nation.”

For all the Kremlin’s apparent evasiveness, Putin’s position on Ukraine has not changed, Bondarev said. “They say we want Ukraine, and they are consistent on this,” he explained.

Already the narrative on the ongoing war has shifted dramatically, Bondarev continued. No longer do U.S. officials talk of backing Ukraine “for as long as it takes,” he said, nor do they espouse their commitment to Ukrainian territorial integrity per its internationally-recognized 1991 borders or its eventual accession to NATO.

Ahead of his meeting with Zelenskyy on Monday, for example, Trump posted to social media explicitly ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine and suggesting Kyiv abandon any hope of regaining Crimea. The president has also hinted that he might walk away from peace efforts if he cannot achieve a breakthrough.

Despite their stauncher backing for Kyiv, European leaders also appear wary of antagonizing the president, while still defending Ukraine’s demands for a ceasefire, security guarantees and its territorial integrity.

If Putin does commit to a meeting, it would be seen by many as “more than a climbdown,” Pavel Luzin, a Russian political analyst at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, told ABC News.

“There would be a major ideological challenge for all the Russian leadership,” Luzin said. “They deny that Ukraine is an enemy equal to them — they still call the Armed Forces of Ukraine ‘Nazi formations,’ ‘combatants’ and so on. And they cannot agree that Ukraine is a sovereign and independent state.”

In 2019, Luzin said, “the Russian delegation was sure that Zelenskyy would sign a kind of ultimate Ukrainian capitulation. If they were to meet in 2025 and Ukraine was not to capitulate, that would damage all the ideological framework of modern Russia.”

Bondarev concurred. A face-to-face meeting that ends without a Ukrainian surrender “will be a humiliation” for Putin, he said, “because he met with someone who is seen by all of his people as someone inferior and he lost, because he was not able to press Zelenskyy into capitulation.”

While the Russian leader does not want to unnecessarily antagonize Trump, Bondarev added, “He doesn’t want to negotiate with Zelenskyy, because Zelenskyy is not an equal for him.”

Ukraine and its Western backers have been vociferous in pushing back on Putin’s narrative, though Trump has at times unsettled Kyiv and European leaders by aligning with Russian talking points casting doubt on Zelenskyy’s legitimacy.

“Putin’s narrative about Ukraine as an artificial country and the proxy of the Western countries means that there is no point in talking to Zelenskyy or any other Ukrainian representative,” Bondarev said.

“It would mean that Zelenskyy or the Ukrainian government has its agency, and they can decide.”