President Vladimir V. Putin’s disdain for his Ukrainian counterpart runs so deep that he almost never utters the name “Zelensky.” The Kremlin insists he’s an illegitimate leader. Russian state television calls him a “clown.”
But President Trump has pinned his recent flurry of diplomacy on the idea that Mr. Putin and President Volodymyr Zelensky will have to come face to face in order to end Russia’s war. Mr. Trump said he “began the arrangements” for such a meeting when he spoke by phone with Mr. Putin on Monday.
And so the whirlwind of diplomatic intrigue in Moscow amid Mr. Trump’s push to halt the fighting shifted to a new mystery on Tuesday: Could the war’s central archenemies soon sit down one on one?
For Mr. Putin, such a summit could be a way to cement a peace deal that the Kremlin would cast as a victory, if Mr. Trump were to pressure Mr. Zelensky to accept Mr. Putin’s demands on Ukraine’s land and sovereignty. But it could also carry political risks, since the Kremlin has long signaled that negotiating directly with Mr. Zelensky would be beneath the Russian leader.
“It would be a compromise,” Konstantin Zatulin, a senior Russian lawmaker, said in a phone interview on Tuesday, casting a potential Putin-Zelensky meeting as a Kremlin concession in itself. “Russia would withdraw its concerns about a meeting with Zelensky in order to support President Trump’s peacemaking efforts.”
Mr. Zatulin said some Russian officials believed Mr. Putin should not meet with Mr. Zelensky in any scenario, given that “Russia has been talking everywhere about Zelensky’s illegitimacy.” But Mr. Zatulin said that in his view, a summit with Mr. Zelensky should be considered because “the stakes are just too high to keep ignoring any possibility of a meeting.”
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The post Putin Won’t Even Say Zelensky’s Name. So Will He Sit Down With Him? appeared first on New York Times.
