Russia and the United States have agreed to hold a meeting between presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump “in the coming days,” Kremlin officials announced on Thursday.
“At the suggestion of the American side, a preliminary agreement was reached to hold a bilateral high-level meeting in the coming days,” Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov told Russian state media.
“We are now working with our American colleagues to finalize the details and location of the meeting,” Ushakov said, adding that the location of the sit-down had already been agreed upon and would be revealed soon.
Putin, answering questions from the press later on Thursday, suggested that the summit with Trump may take place in the United Arab Emirates.
There was no immediate confirmation of the planned meeting from U.S. officials.
If confirmed, the summit would be the first in-person meeting between an American president and Putin since 2021, when the Kremlin leader met with former President Joe Biden in Geneva amid early concerns of a military build-up near the border with Ukraine.
Trump had said on Wednesday that he would likely meet with Putin face-to-face “very soon,” adding that there was also “a very good prospect” that the Russian leader would agree to sit down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
However, Putin told reporters on Thursday that a sit-down with his Ukrainian counterpart was “still far off.”
So, too, were some officials in Washington less upbeat about the likelihood of those kinds of high-level meetings happening in the near future.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox Business on Wednesday that “a lot has to happen” before Putin and Trump sit down in person, noting that “we’ve got to get close enough to that point so that a meeting like that will be productive and worth doing.”
“Today was a good day, but we’ve got a lot of work ahead,” Rubio said. “There’s still many impediments to overcome.”
News of a potential meeting with Putin came hours after Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff met with Putin in Moscow. Trump posted earlier on his Truth Social platform that Witkoff “had a highly productive meeting” with the Kremlin leader, during which “great progress was made.”
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