Russia is not ready to agree to a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to Moscow’s top diplomat.
“Putin is ready to meet with Zelensky when the agenda is ready for a summit, and this agenda is not ready at all,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told NBC News’s Kristen Welker in an upcoming interview.
The full conversation is scheduled to air on NBC”s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
Lavrov’s comments come a week after President Trump met with Putin in Alaska to discuss forging a potential peace deal to end the war with Ukraine that has stretched on since February 2022.
Trump earlier this week met with Zelensky and European leaders at the White House, where they spoke with Putin by phone to try to advance negotiations, agreeing to attempt a bilateral meeting between Zelensky and Putin, followed by a trilateral meeting that the U.S. president would join.
“President Putin said clearly that he is ready to meet provided this meeting is really going to have an agenda, presidential agenda,” Lavrov told Welker in the clip. “President Trump suggested, after Anchorage, several points which we share and on some of them, we agreed to be … to show some flexibility.”
“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 continued, putting the onus on Ukraine to bring flexibility to come up with agreeable parameters for a meeting.
Russia has insisted that as part of any peace deal, Ukraine cannot become a member of NATO and must cede some territory that Russia captured during the more than three-years-long war. Zelensky has pushed back on both ideas, arguing that the Ukrainian constitution doesn’t allow the country to give up land to Russia and requires leaders to pursue security measures, like joining the military alliance.
The Ukrainian president indicated Thursday that he felt Russia was trying to “wriggle out of holding a meeting.”
“They don’t want to end this war,” he wrote on social platform X. “They continue their massive attacks on Ukraine and their ferocious assaults along the frontline.”
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Comments