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By Daniel Bush
White House Correspondent
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For a brief period it appeared as if President Trump had changed his strategy on Ukraine, after months of fruitless peace talks aimed at finding a diplomatic resolution to the war with Russia.
Trump said last month that he believed Ukraine could beat Russia on the battlefield with more help from the West. He followed that up earlier this week by saying he might arm Ukraine with powerful Tomahawk cruise missiles that are capable of striking deep into Russian territory, putting Moscow within range.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other senior U.S. officials also ratcheted up their rhetoric against Moscow in recent days, ahead of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the White House Friday — a further sign, it seemed, of the shift in thinking inside the administration amid growing frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s refusal to end the war.
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Then Trump spoke to Putin Thursday, and threw all of that into question.
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Trump announced after a lengthy phone call with the Russian leader that the two would hold another in-person summit to discuss ending the war. The two leaders met for talks in Alaska in August that did not lead to a breakthrough. Trump said his next meeting with Putin would take place after talks between top U.S. and Russian officials next week.
“President Putin and I will then meet in an agreed upon location, Budapest, Hungary, to see if we can bring this “inglorious” War, between Russia and Ukraine, to an end,” Trump wrote in a social media post.
The announcement surprised lawmakers and analysts in the U.S. and Ukraine, leaving many scratching their heads about Trump’s strategy to end the war.
“The Alaska summit didn’t produce any results, and it seems like President Trump is going to make the same mistake again. It doesn’t make any sense,” Oleksander Merezhko, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, said in a phone interview with Newsweek.
Perhaps “on one hand he’s trying to help Ukraine by giving us Tomahawks and on the other hand he’s trying to put diplomatic pressure on Putin,” Merezhko added. “Maybe Trump is playing some sort of a sophisticated diplomatic game. But on the surface it’s not clear, to put it mildly.”
The phone call with Putin underscores Trump’s tendency to rely on his instincts and personal relationships with other leaders in crafting foreign policy, analysts said.
“It looked like Trump was headed in the right direction with peace through strength” in Ukraine, said Andrew D’Anieri, the associate director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, and “then the Kremlin reaches out” before Zelensky’s visit to the White House.
“With Putin, Trump has talked about doing the hard policy work to actually put pressure on Russia, but he’s declined time and again to take those steps,” D’Anieri said. “Instead he’s favored having high-level meetings and summit after summit, and it’s basically gotten us nowhere.”
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Others said the phone call between the two leaders reflected Putin’s mounting concern that Trump may increase military aid to Ukraine by sending Kyiv Tomahawks and other advanced weapons systems.
“This was not coincidental,” George Barros, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, said of the timing of Thursday's call. “Putin doesn’t want President Trump to lean into the strategy of trying to compel Russia to the [negotiating] table by imposing battlefield losses.”
Trump’s seemingly impromptu decision to meet with Putin again comes after he brokered a ceasefire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas, ending two years of war in the Middle East — at least for the moment. Trump has said he believes that agreement could pave the way for a similar deal to end the war in Ukraine, which started with Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country in 2022.
Zelensky echoed the sentiment earlier this week, arguing that the Gaza ceasefire created “momentum” to end the war in Ukraine. “The war in Europe can also be brought to an end, and for that, the leadership of both the United States and other partners is of utmost importance,” he said in a social media post Tuesday.
Zelensky will meet Friday with Trump, following several days of talks between the administration and a delegation of Ukrainian officials in Washington. Before Trump’s call with Putin, Ukrainian officials had also struck an optimistic tone about the administration’s support for Kyiv.
The talks are focused on “strengthening Ukraine’s air defense, boosting the resilience of our energy sector, expanding long-range capabilities, and exploring additional sanctions on Russia,” Olga Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., said in a statement to Newsweek.
But that work was quickly overshadowed by news of another Trump-Putin summit, throwing a wrench into Ukraine’s plans to cap a week of talks in Washington with Zelensky’s visit. It also raised fresh questions about whether Zelensky would be involved in the Budapest talks after he was left out of the Alaska summit, and whether Trump would announce that he would send Tomahawks to Ukraine when the leaders meet Friday.
“Putin has done this before numerous times to try to stall” the United States from increasing aid to Ukraine at critical moments in the war, Barros said. “He’s been successful in the past. We’ll see if he can do that again.”
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