The Kremlin said on Aug. 7 that Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet with U.S. President Donald Trump “in the coming days.”
“At the suggestion of the American side, it has been agreed in principle to hold a bilateral meeting at the highest level in the coming days,” Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign affairs adviser, told reporters.
Ushakov said the target date for a summit is next week. Putin later said the United Arab Emirates (UAE) would be a suitable host country for the meeting.
On Aug. 7, Putin met with Emirati leader Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Moscow.
Putin said a meeting between him and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was also possible but that the conditions needed for that to happen were still some way off, according to Russia’s state-owned TASS news agency.
In May, Trump visited the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi, and announced that more than $200 billion in additional investment deals had been secured, cementing the United States’ partnership with the Arabian Peninsula nation.
The proposed summit would be Trump’s first meeting with Putin since he returned to the White House earlier this year.
On Aug. 6, Trump said there’s a “very good chance” of a summit to end the Russia–Ukraine conflict.
“We had some very good talks with President Putin today, and there’s a very good chance that we could be ending [the war],” Trump said, when asked in the Oval Office about the chance of a meeting with Putin and Zelenskyy in the near future.
“That road was long and continues to be long, but there’s a good chance that there will be a meeting very soon.”
Steve Witkoff, U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, has been in Moscow this week and met with Putin for three hours of talks on Aug. 6.
Witkoff arrived in Moscow only days before a deadline set by Trump for Russia to make progress on a peace deal.
Trump had said he would implement “severe tariffs” on Russia if it did not make progress on peace talks with Ukraine by Aug. 9.
The sanctions threatened by the Trump administration could include secondary tariffs targeting countries that buy oil and gas from Russia, including China and India.
It was not clear how the announcement of the meeting would affect Trump’s deadline.
For months, Ukraine has been urging an immediate cease-fire, but Russia has said it wants a lasting settlement, not a pause.
In an Aug. 7 post on X, Zelenskyy said Ukraine has “never wanted war” and is working toward peace.
“The main thing is for Russia, which started this war, to take real steps to end its aggression,” he said. “The world has leverage over the aggressor and the means to verify whether promises are being kept. I’m grateful to everyone who is firmly committed to bringing this war to a dignified end.”
The Ukrainian leader said he spoke with Trump on Aug. 6 and planned to speak to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and other European leaders on Aug. 7.
A survey in Ukraine published on Aug. 7 showed that support for a negotiated deal has gone up.
In a July 2022 Gallup poll, 73 percent of Ukrainians said they wanted to keep fighting until victory. According to the latest Gallup survey of 1,000 respondents in Ukraine, that figure has dropped to 24 percent, while 69 percent now believe that Kyiv should seek to negotiate a settlement as soon as possible, up from 22 percent in 2022.
Gallup did not ask respondents what territory they would be willing to concede to Russia in a negotiated settlement.
The meeting will be the first summit between U.S. and Russian leaders since June 2021, when Putin met with then-U.S. President Joe Biden in Geneva.
After that summit, Trump told Fox News’s Sean Hannity: “I think it was a good day for Russia. I don’t think we got anything out of it.”
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Aug. 7, Trump did not acknowledge whether any plans for a meeting with Putin had been set in motion, but clarified that the White House would not require Putin to meet with Zelenskyy as a precondition for holding talks with Washington.
Andrew Thornebrooke and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
