Russia is disputing a White House account that President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are set for a bilateral meeting to discuss an end to the more than three-year-old war.
The push for a bilateral meeting came after President Donald Trump met with Putin in Alaska last week, and welcomed European leaders, Zelenskyy and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte to the White House on Monday.
“Following the encouraging conversations yesterday, President Trump spoke with President Putin by phone and agreed to begin the next phase of the peace process, a meeting between President Putin and President Zelenskyy, which would be followed if necessary by a trilateral meeting between President Putin, President Zelenskyy, and President Trump,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters during Tuesday’s press briefing, which aired on Newsmax and the Newsmax2 free online streaming platform.
The trilateral meeting might come in Budapest, Politico reported Tuesday, but Leavitt declined to confirm the location and noted even that step might not even come if the Zelenskyy-Putin talks do not advance the peace negotiations.
But Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said later Tuesday that any summit between the leaders should be prepared “step-by-step, gradually, starting from the expert level and then going through all the necessary stages,” The Hill reported.
Dmitry Polyanskiy, a Russian deputy representative to the United Nations, told the BBC on Tuesday that “nobody [had] rejected” the opportunity for direct talks, “but it shouldn’t be a meeting for the sake of a meeting.”
Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, said Tuesday that Trump and Putin had a “quite frank and constructive” conversation, discussing the “prospect of exploring opportunities for drawing higher-ranking officials from both Ukraine and Russia into these direct talks, according to The Hill.
The BBC reported Tuesday that Putin suggested to Trump that Zelenskyy travel to Moscow for talks, something Ukraine was never likely to accept. It might have been Russia’s way of putting forward an option so far-fetched that Kyiv could not possibly agree to it.
Newsmax reached out to the White House for comment.
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