Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday that there are no current plans for a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent suggestion that such talks were imminent.
“President Putin said clearly that he is ready to meet, provided this meeting is really going to have an agenda, a presidential agenda,” Lavrov told NBC’s Meet the Press. “There is no meeting planned.”
Trump had announced after hosting Zelensky and European leaders at the White House on Monday that preparations were apparently underway for a face-to-face meeting between the Ukrainian and Russian leaders, to be followed by a trilateral summit that would include him.
Putin has previously indicated he would only meet Zelensky if a deal to end the war had already been worked out in advance. Lavrov’s remarks on Friday appeared to harden that stance after days of vague statements from Moscow suggesting it was open to the idea in principle but not ready to commit.
“President Trump suggested after Anchorage several points which we share, and on some of them we agreed to show some flexibility,” Lavrov said, referring to the recent U.S.-Russia summit in Alaska. That meeting was widely seen as an attempt to defuse Trump’s threats of secondary tariffs against Russia if it refused to agree to a quick settlement of the war.
Lavrov also claimed the White House and Kremlin were aligned on some negotiating points, including Trump’s opposition to Ukraine joining NATO and his view that Kyiv should be ready to cede some territory to Russia.
“Zelensky said no to everything. He even said no to canceling legislation prohibiting the Russian language,” Lavrov said of this week’s White House talks, where Trump and Zelensky met with leaders of a “Coalition of the Willing” led by France and Britain. “How can we meet with a person who is pretending to be a leader?”
Trump has repeatedly said Ukraine should not be admitted to NATO and should consider making territorial concessions as part of a settlement. However, conflicting statements about a possible Putin-Zelensky meeting and about Western security guarantees for Ukraine have fueled speculation of a disconnect between U.S. and Russian officials.
Zelensky, who earlier this week expressed willingness to meet Putin, said Thursday he wanted more clarity on Western security guarantees before committing to a summit with Putin. Lavrov, meanwhile, insisted that Moscow must have an effective veto in any such discussions, further clouding what Western allies may be willing to offer Kyiv.
Trump told conservative news host Todd Starnes on Thursday that he would know “within two weeks” whether Ukraine and Russia were making any progress in the latest phase of peace talks. “After that, we’ll have to maybe take a different tack,” he said.
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