European leaders are holding fresh talks after their White House meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy amid uncertainty over Vladimir Putin’s readiness to meet the Ukrainian president.
The so-called “coalition of the willing” first met virtually, co-chaired by Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, before joining a video conference hosted by the European Council president, António Costa.
Europe’s flurry of diplomacy, after an unprecedented joint visit alongside Zelenskyy to the White House, is aimed at pushing Donald Trump to take a tougher line with Putin, days after their friendly summit in Alaska.
Trump, along with several European leaders in Washington on Monday, said Putin had agreed to face-to-face talks with Zelenskyy in the coming weeks in an attempt to end the three-and-a-half-year war in Ukraine.
Macron on Tuesday proposed Geneva as a venue for the meeting, and a senior US official told Reuters that Hungary was also being considered. Moscow, however, has yet to confirm that any such meeting – which would be the first between the two leaders since the invasion – is in the works.
The Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov has said only that Putin and Trump discussed the idea of “raising the level of representatives” in Ukraine talks. In remarks late on Monday, Ushakov did not clarify what that would entail and made no mention of a possible trilateral meeting with Trump and Zelenskyy.
On Tuesday, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, told state TV that any meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian presidents would have to be prepared “very thoroughly”.
In an interview with Fox News on Tuesday, Trump conceded it was possible that the Russian leader did not want to make a deal. “We’re going to find out about President Putin in the next couple of weeks … It’s possible that he doesn’t want to make a deal,” the US president said, adding that Putin faced a “rough situation” if that were the case.
At the heart of Tuesday’s talks among European allies was the question of what security guarantees can be offered to Ukraine. On Monday, Zelenskyy described security guarantees as “a key issue, a starting point towards ending the war” and he appreciated Trump’s indication that the US was ready to be part of that guarantee.
Zelenskyy said those guarantees would be “formalised in some way in the next week or 10 days”, which could prove to be a long time when it comes to diplomacy involving Trump’s White House.
In a social media post late on Monday, Trump said the White House talks included plans for European countries to provide security assurances to Ukraine with the US acting as “coordinator”.
Britain and several European allies have floated the idea of a “reassurance force” that could be sent to Ukraine under a future peace deal to deter renewed Russian aggression. Their plans would need firm US backing and Trump has been resistant to deploying US troops as guarantors of any settlement. In his Fox interview he said the US was willing to help with air operations.
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