This Friday is the deadline Trump set for a truce in Ukraine. The US president hasn’t ruled out sanctions, but he’s also getting ready for a possible meeting with the Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Outcome of the US representative’s visit to Moscow
On Thursday, Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov said that Moscow and Washington had agreed to hold a summit between the two countries’ leaders following the visit to Moscow the previous day by US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff. The venue for the meeting has already been chosen but will be announced later, and the summit is tentatively scheduled for next week. “There was a proposal from the Americans, which we find quite acceptable,” he said. According to The New York Times (NYT), Donald Trump has informed European allies of his intention to meet with Vladimir Putin next week.
The NYT also reports that after meeting with Putin, Trump plans to organise trilateral talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Moscow has not commented on the idea of such a meeting, proposed by Witkoff, Ushakov said. By the evening of August 7, The New York Post, The Washington Post, POLITICO and Bloomberg reported, citing sources, that Putin’s agreement to meet with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky would be a condition for the Russian-American summit. However, Trump later said that he was not making such a demand. “They want to meet with me, and I will do everything in my power to end the deaths,” he said.
Putin said that, in general, he had no objection to meeting with Zelensky under “certain conditions.”
“But we are still far from creating such conditions,” he said after a meeting with the President of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. He also added that the UAE is one of the “quite suitable” places for his meeting with Trump.
Zelensky said that Kyiv is open to meetings in both bilateral and trilateral formats. “It’s time to end the war,” he wrote after a conversation with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also noted in that the parties still have several obstacles to overcome in “the next few days and hours, and perhaps weeks” for Trump’s meeting with the Russian and Ukrainian leaders to be productive and lay the foundation for a peace agreement. Rubio said that Witkoff brought back a ceasefire proposal from Moscow, but without specific terms. According to him, the talks with Putin allowed Washington to better understand the conditions under which Russia is ready to end the conflict. Now the US will compare them with the position of its European allies and, first and foremost, Kyiv.
“If we can determine fairly accurately what the Ukrainians will accept and what the Russians will accept, then I think the president has an opportunity to hold a meeting with Putin and Zelensky to try to resolve this issue,” Rubio suggested.
Sanctions remain in force
Despite preparations for the summit, Trump has not publicly cancelled the deadline he set for reaching a ceasefire agreement, which expires on August 8. “It will depend on him (Putin). We’ll see what he says. It will depend on him. I am very disappointed,” he said on August 7.
At a press conference the day before, the US president also confirmed the US’s readiness to impose secondary sanctions against countries that import Russian oil. Similar measures had previously been taken against India: its imports to the US were hit with additional 25% tariffs on top of the “reciprocal” tariffs of the same amount that came into force on August 7. Thus, the rate for India was 50%. “We did this with India. We will probably do this with a couple of other countries, one of which may be China,” the US president promised.
Trump may change his mind
However, Rubio admitted that Trump may change his mind: “The president will make this decision within the next 24 to 36 hours. Much will depend on how the negotiations progress and the work we are going to do in the next couple of days. And then, ultimately, it is up to the president to decide whether he still believes that sanctions should be imposed or not until this issue is resolved.”
The main issue of the upcoming summit between the US and Russian leaders is expected to be the resolution of the Ukrainian crisis. In addition, the parties are discussing the prospects for strategic co-operation — this issue was also on the agenda of the meeting between Putin and Witkoff.
The US did not initially consider involving its European partners in the early stages of negotiations with Russia. According to the NYT, there are currently no plans to involve European colleagues. Nevertheless, Washington is keeping its allies informed about the progress of the dialogue with Moscow. According to Bild, after Witkoff’s visit to Moscow, Trump spoke on the phone not only with Zelensky, but also with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Merz, Finnish President Alexander Stubb and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
