Leaders compliment Trump on Ukraine peace process

The White House is touting Monday’s multilateral talks with European leaders as proof positive that Donald Trump is the “president of peace.”

“President Trump is the only president this century, Republican or Democrat, who has held Russia in check and ensured peace in Europe,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a briefing Tuesday. “That’s because Russia has always greatly respected President Trump and his peace-through-strength foreign policy approach.”

Her remarks followed a whirlwind of high-level talks aimed at ending the Russia-Ukraine war. After a shortened summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, on Friday, seven European Union leaders flew to Washington with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to show their solidarity and to discuss next steps with Trump at a meeting on Monday.

“It’s Team Europe and Team United States helping Ukraine,” Finnish President Alexander Stubb said during a White House roundtable conversation with Trump, Zelenskyy, and EU leaders. “I think in the past two weeks, we’ve probably had more progress in ending this war than we have in the past 3½ years.”

The White House is touting the diplomacy blitz as the biggest breakthrough since the war started. The test will be whether Putin and Zelenskyy actually meet.

“We’re entering perhaps the most critical moment in Trump’s peace efforts,” Hudson Institute senior fellow Daniel Kochis told me. “The devil will be in the details even if both parties genuinely desire to come to an agreement.”

Trump called Putin immediately after the multilateral talks at the White House on Monday. He told Fox & Friends this morning that during that call, Putin agreed to a meeting with Trump and Zelenskyy. The location and time have yet to be set.

During a roundtable discussion in the East Room of the White House on Monday, European leaders said the talks gave them hope. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was the first leader to announce she would join Zelenskyy in Washington. In a post on X, she said that progress was made on security guarantees for Ukraine, ending the war, imposing strong sanctions on Russia, and returning tens of thousands of abducted Ukrainian children.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte credited Trump with breaking a deadlock by starting a dialogue with Putin. Trump claimed during the 2024 presidential campaign that the war would never have started in 2022 if he had been in office. For the first time on Friday, Putin agreed.

“I believe it would have been so,” he said during joint remarks to the press after their meeting in Alaska. “I confirm this because President Trump and I have established a generally very good, businesslike, and trustworthy contact.”

Trump hedged on Russia’s culpability in starting the war in the Fox & Friends interview this morning. “You don’t take on a nation that’s 10 times your size,” he said, referring to Ukraine’s size relative to Russia. When a reporter asked Trump on Monday what the root causes of the war were, he did not answer. But he reiterated that Russia is ready to end the war if both sides can work on a deal.

“I would be astonished if we get a ceasefire anytime in the next six months,” Institute on the Study of War analyst George Barros told WORLD. “At the lowest … end, he demands that Ukraine cede over territory the Russians have not achieved. And it would be a massive blow to Putin’s credibility if he doesn’t at least walk away with some of those things.”

Kochis, with the Hudson Institute, added that Putin has long wanted to rehabilitate his image on the world stage, something he accomplished by walking a red carpet with an American president on Friday. Since the meeting, the White House has stopped mentioning sanctioning or imposing high tariffs on Russia.

“From Russia’s statements and talking points on Friday, I do not see any give on their side that would give me hope that the Kremlin is ready to stop the war,” Kochis said. “There was no actual substantive agreement actually announced at that press conference. And the summit itself was cut pretty short. Where it did make a difference was that it bought the Russians time.”

Although Putin agreed that the Friday talks went well and even suggested Trump meet him in Moscow next time, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov equivocated when asked for confirmation that Putin would attend a meeting with Zelenskyy. “Any contacts involving top officials must be prepared with the utmost care,” Lavrov told Russian state media. “We do not refuse any forms of work—neither bilateral nor trilateral.”

“Both leaders have expressed a willingness to sit down with each other, and so our national security team will help both countries do that,” Leavitt said during a White House press briefing when asked whether Putin confirmed his support.

But leaders splinter over the goal of a Zelenskyy-Putin meeting. Given that Russia has continued attacks on civilian populations even while claiming to want an end to the war, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said a ceasefire must be brokered first, along with security guarantees to keep Russia in check.

“I can’t imagine the next meeting will take place without a ceasefire,” Merz said at the start of the roundtable meeting on Monday. “Let’s work on that. Let’s put pressure on Russia.”

Trump pushed back on the idea. In Oval Office remarks with Zelenskyy yesterday, he said that he has already ended several wars without ceasefires, referring to recent peace agreements between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India and Pakistan, and Egypt and Ethiopia. “I like the concept of a ceasefire for one reason: because you stop killing people immediately,” Trump said. “But we can be working on a peace deal. But, strategically, that would be a disadvantage for one side or another. But all of these deals I made without mention of a ceasefire.”

In July, Trump spoke with the leaders of Thailand and Cambodia, after which they announced an immediate ceasefire to deadly border clashes and a five-day war.

Trump said he would call Putin immediately after the talks with the EU leaders. He also clarified that security guarantees do not include American troops on the ground. Throughout all the meetings, he reflected that he assumed the Ukraine-Russia war would be the easiest conflict to solve and lamented that it has taken so long to even get to the table.

“If I can save 7,000 people a week from getting killed, that’s pretty good,” Trump told Fox News. “I want to get to heaven if possible. … I hear I’m at the bottom of the totem pole. If I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”