Trump Arranges Putin-Zelensky Meeting

Trump expressed his hopes earlier in the day that a trilateral meeting could bring about an end to the war.

Despite Trump’s hopeful stance, a meeting between Putin and Zelensky would be unlikely to bring about a swift end to the war due to the lingering mutually exclusive conditions of Moscow and Kyiv. The Monday Oval Office meeting doesn’t appear to have outwardly addressed the key sticking points of Putin’s latest peace deal, especially Ukraine ceding the Donbas and currently occupied territory in Kherson and Zaporozhye oblasts.

Zelensky has repeatedly ruled out any ceding of territory, and his European allies have repeatedly stressed that Russia can’t be allowed to take any territory by force.

Russia also insists that Ukraine’s military must be downsized post-war, another nonstarter for Kyiv. Domestic demands to make Russian a second official language of Ukraine and the protection of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church are viewed as impeding on Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Ukraine also insists on a ceasefire before a peace deal, while Russia views a ceasefire as simply a measure to allow Kyiv’s forces to regroup.

Meanwhile, on the battlefield, Kyiv appears to have plugged an alarming gap in its lines east of the fortress city of Pokrovsk that threatened to collapse its defensive line but, in doing so, weakened other parts of the front. Russia maintains its momentum and has continued battering Ukrainian industry across the country. This month’s breakthrough near Pokrovsk illustrated the teetering state of Ukraine’s military, but Zelensky has shown no signs of ceding any further territory peacefully.