Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has said there are no plans for a meeting between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, despite Donald Trump’s suggestion that a summit could take place in the coming weeks.
In an interview with NBC News on Friday, Lavrov said that the agenda for a meeting between the Ukrainian and Russian leaders was “not ready at all”.
His comments came just a week after Trump met face-to-face with Putin in Alaska for the first time in seven years for talks aimed at ending Russia’s invasion. After the summit, Trump said that he would help set up a meeting between Zelensky and Putin, which would be followed by a trilateral summit that would include him.
Earlier this week, Trump suggested a meeting between the two leaders could be arranged easily as they “may be getting along a little bit better than I thought”.
But Lavrov appeared to cast doubt on whether such a summit could take place, saying: “Putin is ready to meet with Zelensky when the agenda would be ready for a summit. And this agenda is not ready at all.”
Lavrov said Russia had agreed to be flexible on a number of points raised by Trump but that Moscow’s demands for a peace deal were unchanged.
“When President Trump brought … those issues to the meeting in Washington, it was very clear to everybody that there are several principles which Washington believes must be accepted, including no Nato membership, including the discussion of territorial issues, and Zelensky said no to everything,” he said.
Zelensky said that Russia was doing everything it could to stop a meeting between him and Putin from taking place and urged Ukraine’s allies to place fresh sanctions on Moscow if it does not engage with peace talks.
Speaking at a joint press conference with Nato secretary general Mark Rutte in Kyiv, the Ukrainian President said that security guarantees for Ukraine in a potential peace deal should be similar to those in Nato’s Article 5, which considers an attack on one member of the alliance as an attack against all.
“The Russians are doing everything they can to prevent the meeting from taking place,” Zelensky said on Friday.
“Unlike Russia, Ukraine is not afraid of any meeting with leaders.”
A failure to agree a meeting between the two leaders would be an embarrassment for Trump, who once claimed he could end the war in Ukraine in the first 24 hours of his second presidential term.
Despite Trump’s efforts to initiate a peace agreement, there remains a considerable chasm between both sides over a number of issues, including the possibility of land concessions and security guarantees for Kyiv.
Earlier this week, Lavrov said that any security discussions about Ukraine that do not involve Moscow were a “road to nowhere”. He suggested that a “truly reliable” guarantee could be modelled on a draft accord that was discussed between the warring parties in Istanbul in 2022. Kyiv rejected the proposal at the time.
Trump has ruled out sending any American ground troops into Eastern Europe but said it could support the peacekeeping effort by air, stating that Europe’s powers would be the “first line of defence” but receive “a lot of help” from the US.
He has also dismissed the prospect of Ukraine joining Nato, a red line for Putin.
On Friday, Ukraine’s military struck a critical oil pumping station in the Bryansk region, halting deliveries of oil to Hungary for the second time in a week.
The Druzhba pipeline ships oil from Russia to Hungary and Slovakia, as well as from Kazakhstan to Germany. Ukraine has repeatedly attacked the pipeline’s facilities this month, causing a few days of supply disruption.
