Trump and Putin plan Saudi Arabia meeting as US lays out blunt vision for Ukraine

Washington: US President Donald Trump intends to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Saudi Arabia as part of negotiations to end the war in Ukraine that would begin immediately following a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call between the two leaders.

Praising Putin as a man of common sense who wanted peace, Trump indicated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would need to make concessions and the US would demand compensation for hundreds of billions in aid in the form of natural resources.

Donald Trump described his call with Vladimir Putin as “lengthy and productive”.Credit: AP

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Putin “mentioned the need to eliminate the root cause of the conflict and agreed with Trump that a long-term settlement could be achieved through peaceful negotiations.” The Kremlin said that “the time has come for our countries to work together”. Ukraine and Russia disagree on the “root cause”.

The flurry of activity, which also included a call between Trump and Zelensky, came as the new administration laid out a blunt US vision for a peace deal at a high-level defence meeting in Europe which cast many of Ukraine’s goals as unrealistic.

Ukraine would not return to its pre-2014 borders and would not join the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO), and American troops would not take part in a peacekeeping mission, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told the Ukraine Defence Contact Group in Brussels.

Following his call with Putin, which lasted at least an hour, Trump said the Russian leader wanted “to make peace”, as did Zelensky. He said Putin, like himself, believed “very strongly” in common sense and the two had agreed to “work together very closely, including visiting each other’s nations”.

Volodymyr Zelensky has indicated he is prepared to return territory taken from Russia in exchange for NATO membership.Credit: AP

Trump later told reporters: “We expect that he will come here, and I’ll go there, and we’re going to meet also probably in Saudi Arabia the first time [to] see if we can get something done.” That first meeting would likely exclude Zelensky, he said.

Asked if he saw Ukraine as an equal member of the peace process, Trump said: “They have to make peace. Their people are being killed. I said that was not a good war to go into, and I think they have to make peace.”

Trump said he believed some of the land Russia had annexed since 2014 would go back to Ukraine. Asked if Ukraine would need to cede some Russian-occupied territory, he said Zelensky “is gonna have to do what he has to do, but his poll numbers aren’t particularly great, to put it mildly, [and] he’s got a country that’s been savaged and attacked”.

Trump also said he foresaw a ceasefire “in the not too distant future”.

Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth addresses the Ukraine Defence Contact Group in Brussels.Credit: AP

Zelensky characterised his phone call with Trump as a meaningful conversation and said he was grateful to the US president for his interest. “No one wants peace more than Ukraine,” Zelensky posted on X. “As President Trump said, let’s get it done.”

The exchanges came as Hegseth confirmed the new administration’s position in emphatic terms to a meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group at NATO headquarters in Brussels, while also stressing the US was too busy staving off China’s aggression in the Pacific to prioritise European matters.

“We want, like you, a sovereign and prosperous Ukraine. But we must start by recognising that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” he said. “Chasing this illusory goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”

Zelensky had already said he was willing to cede some territory to Russia but indicated this would need to be accompanied by NATO membership and a NATO military presence in Ukraine to fend off any future Russian aggression.

Confirmed: Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence.Credit: AP

In 2014, Putin began backing separatists in the eastern part of Ukraine and annexed the Crimea Peninsula, although most countries still recognise it as part of Ukraine. Zelensky has said Ukraine will not take back the territory militarily, but hopes to regain it by diplomatic means.

While the Trump administration wanted robust security guarantees for Ukraine, “the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement”, Hegseth said.

“Instead, any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops. If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission, and they should not be covered under Article 5.”

That article, a core tenet of the treaty, states that an attack on any member state is considered an attack on all, compelling assistance from all members. “To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be US troops deployed to Ukraine,” Hegseth said.

Donald Trump welcomed American schoolteacher Marc Fogel to the White House after securing his release from a Russian prison.Credit: AP

The overnight phone call between Trump and Putin was the first official exchange between the two men that Trump has confirmed since returning to the White House, but he has hinted at other calls.

On the weekend, he told The New York Post’s Miranda Devine he had spoken with the Russian president but would not confirm how many times. “I’d better not say,” he reportedly said.

The US this week secured the release of an American schoolteacher, Marc Fogel, who had been imprisoned in Russia for four years. Fogel flew home to the US on Tuesday and met Trump and other dignitaries at the White House that evening. Trump was coy about what the deal involved, but the Kremlin since said a Russian prisoner was being released from the US. That prisoner is Alexander Vinnik, a cybercriminal convicted over money laundering around $US4 billion via his BTC-e, once one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. The Washington Post reported he was accused of facilitating “hacking incidents, ransomware scams, identity theft schemes and other crimes”.

On the US side, the Ukraine negotiations will be led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA director John Ratcliffe, national security adviser Michael Waltz and Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff.

In Brussels, Hegseth also reiterated Trump’s insistence that NATO members spend 5 per cent of their gross domestic product on defence, something only Poland comes close to doing. Spending more on defence was “a down-payment on peace through strength”, he said.

“Stark strategic realities” prevented the US from focusing on the security of Europe, Hegseth told the meeting, saying China had the capability and intent to threaten the US at home and through its core interests in the Indo-Pacific.

Britain’s Defence Secretary John Healey and Ukraine’s Defence Minister Rustem Umerov at the Brussels meeting.Credit: AP

“The US is prioritising deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognising the reality of scarcity and making the resourcing trade-offs to ensure deterrence does not fail,” he said. “As the United States prioritises its attention to these threats, European allies must lead from the front.”

While the US remained committed to the NATO alliance, it “will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency”, Hegseth said. He did not take questions.

Speaking directly afterwards, British Defence Secretary John Healey said members of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group heard Hegseth’s message clearly and were determined to end Putin’s war.

“On stepping up for Ukraine, we are and we will. On stepping up for European security, we are, and we will,” he said.

Separately, in a development the Kremlin will mark as a victory, as Trump’s pick to run the US intelligence services, former Democratic congresswoman-turned-Trump-acolyte Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed by the Senate.

Gabbard was confirmed 52-48 in a vote along party lines except for a single Republican holdout, the former Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell from Kentucky.

Gabbard has flirted with Kremlin propaganda and expressed sympathy for Russia and Syria, and during her confirmation hearing she refused invitations to describe Edward Snowden as a traitor for leaking classified information about US intelligence operations.

McConnell said Gabbard had shown “a history of alarming lapses in judgment”. Other Republicans who had raised concerns about her ultimately fell into line and endorsed her appointment.

Wavering Republicans faced an intense political pressure campaign from Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk, who threatened to support primary opponents of any Republican who obstructed nominees.

Asked about McConnell’s decision, a White House spokeswoman said Trump was greatly disappointed in any Republican who opposed his “exceptionally qualified” candidates. “We expect all Republicans to vote, to stay tough and strong,” she said.

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