Russian President Vladimir Putin meets the US President's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, at the Kremlin Palace in Moscow. Photo / Getty Images
President Donald Trump intends to meet “very soon” with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the war in Ukraine, the President said, adding that he believes “there’s a very good chance” of reaching an agreement.
It was unclear, however, whether Putin had offered any concessions to Trump in exchange for a meeting, which a White House official said could come as early as next week.
A meeting between the two leaders would be a significant win for Putin after weeks of Trump’s verbal attacks on him. Trump repeatedly has said that while he and Putin have good conversations, those are followed by renewed Russian attacks on Ukraine.
Asked by reporters at a White House event if Putin had offered anything in return for the meeting this time, Trump offered no specifics, saying only that “we’ve had very productive talks today”.
“I’ve been disappointed before with this one,” Trump noted. But, he said, “we’re having very serious talks right now about … getting it settled, getting it ended”.
Trump’s openness to meeting with Putin came after a meeting earlier in the day in Moscow between Putin and the President’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff.
In an interview on Fox Business, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that as a result of Witkoff’s meeting, “I think for the first time, perhaps since this administration began, we have some concrete examples of the kinds of things that Russia would ask for in order to end the war”.
“Now, they may not be the conditions Ukraine can accept or, frankly, that others would accept. But at least we have something to work off of,” he said.
“I’ve always believed – I’ve always said this … if there’s going to be a deal to end this war, it will have to require the President to come in at the end and close on it,” Rubio added.
Typically, summit meetings take place to seal agreements that have been worked out by lower-level officials. Trump, however, has long believed in his ability to personally negotiate agreements.
Sceptics of Trump’s approach warned that Putin could take advantage of Trump’s eagerness to reach a deal and use a face-to-face meeting to enlist the US in putting pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to make major concessions to Moscow.
“It seems that Russia is now more committed to a ceasefire. The pressure on them is working,” Zelenskyy said during a scheduled appearance on Ukrainian television. “But the main thing is that they do not deceive us or the United States in the details.”
A meeting with Trump “is something Putin always wanted … without anything being agreed", said Liana Fix, a specialist in European security policy and Russia at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“I’m pretty sceptical,” Fix said. “A bilateral meeting is always a victory for the Russian side,” she added, “a very successful diversion for him from the momentum of pressure that was building up”.
Ukraine’s European allies have tried to persuade Trump to keep up pressure on Putin, but they won’t be present at a summit meeting, she noted.
“The idea always was that a summit, especially between Trump and Putin, would be the crowning act of a campaign to put Putin under pressure,” Fix said.
Russian opposition figure Garry Kasparov offered a harsher assessment, writing in a social media post that the agreement to meet was part of a “process of normalising and elevating” Putin, “offering him concessions and lifelines that only embolden him to further aggression”.
The announcement of a possible Trump-Putin meeting capped a day of mixed signals. Trump praised Witkoff’s meeting with Putin, writing on his social media platform that the session was “highly productive” and that “Great progress was made!”
Several hours after Witkoff met Putin, however, Trump doubled tariffs on India to 50%, moving on his earlier threat to impose penalties on trading partners that have helped sustain the Russian economy and the Kremlin’s war machine, especially by continuing to buy Russian oil.
Trump’s executive order announcing the new tariffs stated that Russia’s actions “continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” through its war on Ukraine and that India “is directly or indirectly importing Russian Federation oil”.
He ordered the increase in tariffs on India to take effect in three weeks, once more providing a window of several more weeks for some kind of deal. But the delay also allows more time for Russian forces to advance in Ukraine.
In addition to hitting India, Trump’s order said the US could increase tariffs on other countries buying oil from Moscow – such as China, another major importer of Russian oil. At the White House event Wednesday, Trump said he might add additional countries to the sanctions list in coming weeks.
The talks between Witkoff and Putin began shortly before midday Moscow time and ended around 2.40pm, according to the Kremlin.
Earlier, Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, visited a restaurant in Zaryadye Park near the Kremlin, where they spent about 90 minutes, before visiting an observation deck overlooking the Moscow River, state-run Ria Novosti reported.
After the meeting, Dmitriev described the talks as “successful”, adding, “Dialogue will prevail”, in a post on X.
Instead of the full truce that Trump has demanded for months, Putin was reportedly considering a partial ceasefire, possibly by ending the missile and drone attacks Russia has ramped up against Ukrainian cities in recent months. More than 6700 Ukrainian civilians have been killed in the first half of this year, according to the United Nations. Last week, Trump described Russia’s attacks on Ukraine as “disgusting” and “a disgrace”.
But there were no immediate indications from either side about whether Putin tried to deflect the sanctions on Russia’s trading partners by offering a partial ceasefire.
A partial truce might have halted the deadly attacks on civilians but would not prevent Russia from advancing in eastern Ukraine, where it has been making slow but steady progress, gaining 2295sq km from the end of December to the end of June, according to data from the Institute for the Study of War think tank.
It also would have neutered Ukraine’s most effective tool in the war: drone attacks on key Russian military facilities, including strategic air bases, bombers, spy planes, oil refineries, fuel and ammunition storage facilities, and factories associated with military production.
On Saturday, Ukrainian drone attacks hit two major Russian oil refineries, Reuters reported. The Ryazan oil refinery, operated by Rosneft oil company, has halved its refining capacity since the attack, and the company’s Novokuibyshevsk refinery shut down. Ukraine is at a disadvantage in ground fighting because of chronic shortages of soldiers and weapons – another reason the partial ceasefire could benefit Russia.
With Witkoff in Moscow, rescuers in Ukraine were responding to a Russian strike on a civilian recreation centre in the Zaporizhzhia region that killed two people and injured 12, according to Zelenskyy.
“There is zero military sense in this strike – just cruelty aimed at instilling fear,” Zelenskyy posted on X. In Ukraine’s Odesa region, a Russian strike on a natural gas facility left hundreds of families without fuel, he said. Russia consistently claims that all its strikes target military facilities.
“No matter what the Kremlin says, they will only genuinely seek to end the war once they feel adequate pressure,” Zelenskyy said. “And right now, it is very important to strengthen all the levers in the arsenal of the United States, Europe and the G-7 so that a ceasefire truly comes into effect immediately. Ukraine sees the political will, appreciates the efforts of our partners, of America, and of everyone who is helping. And we are counting on the necessary decisions to follow.”
Before Wednesday, Witkoff, as Trump’s emissary, had met Putin four times without denting the Russian leader’s maximalist conditions to halt attacks, despite numerous concessions put forward by Washington, including keeping Ukraine out of Nato and enabling Russia to continue to occupy the territory it has illegally annexed.
But little progress has been made, with Putin successfully deflecting US pressure for a ceasefire, arguing that the matter is too complex to be solved quickly and insisting that Russia would keep fighting.
The most recent direct talks between Russia and Ukraine took place last month in Istanbul and appeared to last less than an hour, with both sides agreeing on a prisoner exchange, while their positions on a ceasefire remained far apart.
Witkoff has been criticised in the past for echoing Kremlin rhetoric, appearing not to know details about the conflict, attending lengthy meetings with Putin and other top Russian officials alone, and relying on a Kremlin-supplied interpreter.
Despite Trump’s criticism of Russia’s apparent delaying tactics, Putin said last week that any disappointment over peace negotiations was due to “excessive expectations”, reiterating that Russia’s conditions haven’t changed.
Trump has stepped back from direct military support for Ukraine but said last month that the US would sell weapons to Nato countries, including air defence systems and interceptors, which they could then send to Ukraine.
Ukraine has for months called for tougher sanctions on Russia to press Putin to end the war. Andriy Yermak, head of Ukraine’s presidential office, wrote in The Washington Post on Monday that sanctions need to target Russia’s military industrial complex, block major Russian bank Gazprombank and prevent dual-use electronics from reaching Russia.
“Trump’s decision last week to raise tariffs on India for purchasing Russian oil above the price cap surely rattled the Kremlin. It’s a great first step, but more pressure is needed,” he wrote.
Trump’s threatened sanctions could pose a significant challenge to Russia, which is spending about 40% of its state budget on its military and security, amid a sharp decline in revenue from oil.
Although the Kremlin appears confident that it could withstand new sanctions, its economy is under intense pressure from the war, with high interest rates bankrupting small businesses, regions struggling with high expenditures on military recruitment and manufacturing suffering a decline. The Izvestia newspaper reported Tuesday that nearly 141,000 Russian businesses were liquidated in the first six months of the year.
Western sanctions include capping oil prices at US$60 a barrel for crude, designed to bar companies from trading and transporting Russian oil above the price cap. Russia has weathered sanctions so far through oil sales, mainly to China and India, evading restrictions via a “shadow fleet” of several hundred ageing oil tankers with opaque ownership and registration details, flagged from countries with lax regulations.
Sanctions on oil tankers have proved relatively successful, analysts say, with the Kyiv School of Economics reporting in June that the US, European Union, Britain and Canada had sanctioned a total of 496 tankers. But it said there was scope for better enforcement, with 135 sanctioned tankers recorded to have taken shipments at Russian ports between March and May.