Trump says a Putin and Zelensky meeting will be set up very soon, and the Kremlin ties the timing of the next Ukraine talks to the war in the Middle East

Trump spoke to reporters on Wednesday, October 28. “There will be a meeting set up very soon and I think a lot of progress could be made,” he said. He gave no date, no venue and no format, and he did not say whether he would sit in the room.

Zelensky gave the fuller version in The Hague, at a press conference with Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten. He said preparations are under way, that Kyiv is waiting for Washington to confirm a date, and that he hopes the talks will be held between November 6 and November 10, after the American midterm elections on November 3. “After November 4, we will have a date,” he said. The meeting he described is a meeting of negotiating teams, not of presidents. He said he does not know when a meeting with Putin might happen, and that the hardest questions, territory and security guarantees for Ukraine, can only be settled by the leaders themselves. He left open a move away from Abu Dhabi because of the situation in the Middle East, but he said the dates should hold.

Ushakov, Putin's foreign policy aide, cooled the timetable the same day. He told Russian news agencies that Moscow has not proposed a specific date. “It will also depend on the situation on the battlefield and the situation in general. You can see the situation now in the Middle East. It just does not allow us to hold it in the near future. That is my assumption,” he said. He said European negotiators are not under consideration. “There is absolutely no talk about this, nothing being considered,” he said. “What there is now is an agreement on resuming three sided consultations with representatives of Russia, Ukraine and the United States.”

Ukraine, Russia and the United States held rounds of talks in Abu Dhabi in January and February of this year and reached no agreement on territory. The format has been stalled since then. Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the war is in its fifth year. Putin has repeatedly refused face to face talks with Zelensky.