WASHINGTON — One week after President Donald Trump’s summit with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin seems in no hurry to build on progress that Trump said was made in his bid to end the war in Ukraine.
Any momentum from their nearly three-hour meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, appears to have slowed, though administration officials say they’re not giving up on a solution and will keep working to broker an elusive peace deal.
Russia’s top diplomat said in an interview with NBC News on Friday that Putin is prepared to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, though the agenda for a sit-down is “not ready at all.”
“President Putin said clearly that he is ready to meet provided this meeting is really going to have an agenda, presidential agenda,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in an exclusive interview.
That pronouncement seemed at odds with Trump’s assertion Monday that he had spoken to Putin by phone and had begun arranging a meeting between the Russian leader and Zelenskyy. Once that meeting takes place, he said he would sit down with both men in pursuit of an accord.
Speaking to reporters Friday afternoon in the Oval Office, Trump sounded more tentative about the next steps in stopping a war that began with Russia’s invasion in 2022 and has since claimed about 1.5 million casualties on both sides.
“We’ll see what happens,” said Trump, who also held up a picture of himself and Putin that the Russian leader had sent him after the summit. “I think over the next two weeks, we’re going to find out which way it’s going to go. And I better be very happy.”
In that two-week period, he said, “I’m going to make a decision as to what we do, and it’s going to be, it’s going to be a very important decision, and that’s whether or not it’s massive sanctions or massive tariffs, or both. Or do we do nothing and say, ‘It’s your fight.’”
(“Two weeks” is a deadline that Trump often invokes when it comes to any number of policy goals, dating to his first term.)
Stopping a conflict rooted in ancient grievances over land and national identity is no small task. The impasse between the combatants centers on security guarantees for Ukraine, along with the fate of Ukrainian territory that Russia has tried to seize by force.
Further delays could work to Putin’s advantage, allowing his troops to cement gains made on the battlefield.
One Western official said Lavrov’s remarks have frustrated the White House, as they suggest that Russia may be backtracking on commitments that Trump believes he extracted from Putin.
“The Russians are just kind of rowing it back day by day,” the official said. “So it looks and feels like they’re being played, which is frustrating to any president, but particularly to someone of President Trump’s nature.”
Still, Trump administration officials said they aren’t giving up on the prospect of a peace deal.
“Nobody is ready to throw in the towel,” a national security official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “One of the things the president has been very clear on is that if there is a path to end this diplomatically in the near term, then he wants to seize it. There is no military solution to the conflict. The question is whether you have a diplomatic solution now or whether it takes the next six or 12 or 18 months to get to that standpoint.”
Trump raised hopes that a breakthrough might be in sight with his face-to-face meeting with Putin, followed by his sit-down three days later at the White House with Zelenskyy and European leaders.
After that cross-country round of diplomacy, the path to a truce remains as murky as ever. In a social media post Thursday, Trump wrote that because Ukraine is largely defending its turf, it can’t defeat Russia. A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the post was meant to signal that Ukraine will need to accept a deal largely on Russia’s terms.
Negotiations are unfolding against the backdrop of the White House’s public bid to land Trump the Nobel Peace Prize. An unpopular figure in Europe, Trump would face tough odds even if he mediates an end to the war that’s fair to Ukraine.
Christian Tybring-Gjedde is a member of the Norwegian parliament who nominated Trump for the Nobel Prize in his first term.
“If he wants to have the Nobel Committee’s attention, he has to create a peace that is based on the needs of Ukraine,” Tybring-Gjedde said in an interview Friday. “Ukraine has been invaded. It’s been violated. They’re now fighting for survival as a nation.”
“You have to understand who the aggressor is,” he added.
Having lifted the stakes, Trump administration officials and outside allies are now putting forward a message that the conflict may not be that important to everyday Americans after all.
Sen. Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican who has introduced a Senate resolution calling for Trump to win the Nobel Prize, said at a forum Wednesday in Cleveland: “Look, the war is not America’s war. If the war continues, if the war ends, it doesn’t change the lives of Americans.”
In an appearance Sunday on “Meet the Press,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that “if tomorrow the war continues, life in America will not be fundamentally altered.”
Trump sounded a more dire note during a tense meeting with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February, warning that the conflict could spiral into World War III if not brought to an end.
A White House official told NBC News this week: “President Trump and his national security team continue to engage with Russian and Ukrainian officials towards a bilateral meeting to stop the killing and end the war. As many world leaders have stated, this war would have never happened if President Trump was in office. It is not in the national interest to further negotiate these issues publicly.”
For his part, Rubio is coordinating an effort among U.S. allies to protect Ukraine from future Russian attacks once the war ends. A security guarantee is crucial to Zelenskyy, who has said he wants a concrete plan in a little over a week.
Rubio led a discussion Thursday with the national security advisers from Britain, Finland, Germany, France and Italy, as well as diplomats from the European Union and NATO, a U.S. official confirmed.
A source familiar with the meeting said progress continues, adding that the blueprint for Ukrainian security must be in place ahead of any potential summit between the Ukrainian and Russian leaders.
When it comes to a security guarantee for Ukraine, there’s a divergence between what Russia wants and what the West is willing to accept.
Lavrov said earlier this week that Russia categorically rejects “any scenarios that envision the appearance of military contingents of NATO countries in Ukraine, which would be fraught with uncontrollable escalation of the conflict and unpredictable consequences.”
Yet the European Union’s ambassador to the U.S., Jovita Neliupšienė, told reporters Friday: “Russia cannot have the veto for E.U. or NATO membership, and decisions on territories are solidly Ukraine’s decisions and international borders must not be changed by force.”
If negotiations bog down, that could spark a movement in Congress to slap secondary sanctions on countries that buy Russian energy or do business with Putin’s regime.
Last month, in a rare bit of bipartisanship, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut introduced a resolution that would punish countries “that continue to fund Putin’s barbaric war in Ukraine.”
Blumenthal, in an interview, said the West is losing patience. Trump’s summit meeting with Putin failed to produce a ceasefire — an outcome that serves Putin’s interests, he said.
“It’s as plain as day that Vladimir Putin wants continued war because he thinks he’s winning,” said Blumenthal, a member of the Armed Services Committee. “The longer it goes, the better it is for him. His strategy has been plain from the beginning of this war: outlast the people of Ukraine and their supporters, sacrifice whatever Russian blood is necessary, and conquer Ukraine. And if there’s a pause, be ready to invade again.”
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