Vladimir Putin gave Donald Trump a strict 15-minute window to make a late-night phone call to the Kremlin after White House peace talks with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Laura Ingraham that after his discussions with Zelensky and a host of European leaders on Monday, Trump wanted to call Putin to organize a meeting with the Ukrainian president.
Putin told Trump he was about to go to bed and if he couldn’t call him right away he could contact him the next day instead.
“Look, it was very late in Moscow,” Bessent explained on Fox’s The Ingraham Angle. “President Putin was open to meeting with President Zelensky and as you know President Trump is very persuasive, they had just met.”
Trump had made it clear he was keen to lock in a meeting between Putin and Zelensky after his discussion with European leaders this week on ending Russia’s war on Ukraine.
When asked if Putin was staying up to wait for the call from Trump, Bessent said, “Well, the president gave him the option, ‘I could call or send a message’ and Putin said ‘Well, I will be up for 15 more minutes or you can call tomorrow’. And I think Putin wanted the call that night. So that showed he was eager to hear what the president had to say.”
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that during his pre-bedtime phone call with Trump, Putin agreed to “begin the next phase of the peace process—a meeting between President Putin and President Zelensky.“
However, comments from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggest the meeting has yet to be locked in on Putin’s end. “Any contacts involving top officials must be prepared with the utmost care,” Lavrov said on Tuesday. “We do not refuse any forms of work—neither bilateral nor trilateral.”
On Tuesday, Trump said on Truth Social that the meeting between Putin and Zelensky would happen “at a location to be determined.” The Washington Post suggested the Hungarian capital Budapest could be a possible option. That would be followed by a trilateral meeting of the two presidents joined by Trump.
Bessent told The Ingraham Angle that Trump wants to be a peacemaker.
“He has done six peace deals. He knows how to do this. He went in with a plan, we had a long pre-game in the Oval (Office) beforehand. He had a strategy the whole time,” Bessent said.
“They understand that President Trump is the only person in the world who can stop this conflict,” he added.
In an interview on Tuesday night, Trump said he wanted Putin and Zelensky to meet on their own first to clear the air.
Yesterday, important talks took place in Washington with the President of the United States and European leaders. This was truly a significant step toward ending the war and ensuring the security of Ukraine and our people. We are already working on the concrete content of the… pic.twitter.com/FXGnQfcdzz
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) August 19, 2025
“I thought it would be better if they met without me, just to see. I want to see what goes on,” the president told The Mark Levin Show.
“You know, they had a hard relationship, very bad, very bad relationship. And now we’ll see how they do and, if necessary, and it probably would be, but if necessary, I’ll go and I’ll probably be able to get it closed.”
He added, “I just want to see what happens at the meeting. So they’re in the process of setting it up, and we’re going to see what happens.”
U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff claimed on Tuesday that Russia has made “concessions almost immediately” following Trump and Putin’s meeting in Alaska last week.
“We stayed there for quite some time because we actually made progress on how we might get to a peace deal,” Witkoff told Fox News. “The president began to sense in this meeting in Alaska that we had a lot of the precursors agreed to for a peace deal, so why not pursue an entire peace deal?”
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