Trump announces Budapest summit with Putin as Zelensky arrives in Washington for Tomahawk talks

US President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he would meet with Vladimir Putin in Budapest in the coming weeks following a “very productive” call with the Russian leader, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived in Washington to make Kyiv’s case for Tomahawk missiles on Friday.

Hailing the "great progress” made with Putin in the call, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that “high-level” delegations from Washington and Moscow would meet face-to-face next week, followed by a summit between the two leaders in the Hungarian capital “to see if we can bring this ‘inglorious’ War, between Russia and Ukraine, to an end”.

Trump’s upbeat tone following the call indicates the latest shift in his stance on the war in Ukraine, with the US president having grown increasingly frustrated with Putin after a previous summit in Alaska in August failed to produce a breakthrough on a peace deal.

Since then, Trump has repeatedly expressed his disappointment with the Russian leader and even suggested Ukraine could retake parts of its territory currently occupied by Russia, while both Moscow and Kyiv have lamented the loss of momentum in peace efforts.

Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov told reporters that the call, the eighth between Putin and Trump this year, was a “very substantive” discussion that lasted almost two and a half hours and that preparations for the summit in Budapest would begin “immediately”.

While Putin insisted Russia wanted a “peaceful political and diplomatic resolution” of the war in Ukraine, Ushakov said, he told Trump that Russian forces “hold complete strategic initiative along the entire line of contact” and that Ukraine was resorting to “terrorist methods, striking civilian targets and energy infrastructure, to which we are forced to respond accordingly”.

Putin also stressed that any US decision to supply Ukraine with the long-range Tomahawk missiles sought by Zelensky would “not change the situation on the battlefield” but would cause “significant damage” to Russian-US relations and harm the "prospects for a peaceful settlement”, Ushakov continued.

On his arrival in Washington on Thursday evening, Zelensky said that Russia was “rushing to resume dialogue as soon as it hears about Tomahawks”.

“We expect that the momentum of curbing terror and war that succeeded in the Middle East will help to end Russia’s war against Ukraine”, Zelensky wrote on X ahead of his meeting with Trump at the White House on Friday, during which he is expected to push for the long-range missiles that the US president has so far remained noncommittal on providing. 

“Putin is certainly no braver than Hamas or any other terrorist. The language of strength and justice will inevitably work against Russia as well,” Zelensky wrote.