Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump will meet in the coming days, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said on Thursday, in what would be the first summit between leaders of the two countries since 2021.
“At the suggestion of the American side, an agreement was essentially reached to hold a bilateral meeting at the highest level in the coming days,” Interfax news agency quoted Ushakov as saying. “We are now beginning concrete preparations together with our American colleagues.”
He did not say where the summit would take place. Putin was due later on Thursday to meet the president of the United Arab Emirates, which sources have previously suggested as a possible venue.
The announcement came a day after Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, met for three hours Wednesday with Putin.
Ushakov said Witkoff had raised the possibility of a three-way meeting of Trump, Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
But he said the Russian side had left this proposal “completely without comment.”
“We propose, first of all, to focus on preparing for a bilateral meeting with Trump and we believe that the main thing is for this meeting to be successful and productive,” Ushakov said.
A meeting with Putin would be Trump’s first with the Russian leader since returning to the Oval Office.
They met five times during his first term between 2017 and 2021, including a notable Helsinki summit in which Trump appeared to take Putin’s side over American intelligence agencies with respect to the subject of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. The Trump White House also departed from previous administrations, with readouts or interpreter notes from the discussions with Putin not readily available.
According to reports from multiple U.S. media outlets, Trump and Putin continued to speak by phone periodically even after the Republican was defeated in the 2020 presidential election.
Trump returned to the White House seeking to mend relations with Moscow, although in more recent comments has expressed increasing frustration with Putin over Russia’s escalating strikes on civilian areas of Ukraine.
