Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
High-stakes diplomacy is buzzing through the halls of the United Nations, but it has hit a familiar wall.
A day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met Donald Trump on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York and pressed him to arrange a three-way summit with Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin drew its own line.
Moscow said Putin was ready for another sit-down with Trump, but any face-to-face with Zelensky would have to happen on Russian soil.
According to Russian state-run news agency TASS, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Wednesday that “Putin is ready” for another meeting with Trump if the need arose, saying the two leaders had “always emphasized in their telephone conversations their readiness to hold another meeting at some point if necessary.”
He added that “holding a summit before work has been done at the expert level is impractical, it will be a waste of time.”
On a possible Putin-Zelensky meeting, Peskov was blunter. “Our position is well known,” he said. “Putin said that Zelensky can come to Moscow if he wants to. He will be provided with security guarantees and he knows very well what decisions must be made.”
Zelensky’s UN pitch
Zelensky had used his meeting with Trump on Tuesday to press for a leaders’ trilateral. The Ukrainian president told reporters afterward he was “ready (to sit down with Putin) any time” and said the “most important thing” Trump could do was persuade the Russian leader to join in-person trilateral talks at the G20 summit in Miami.
That plan runs into a scheduling problem. Putin intends to attend Xi Jinping’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen on November 18-19 and is expected to skip Trump’s G20 at the Doral golf resort on December 14-15, Kyiv Post reported, citing Bloomberg.
Peskov has previously called a Putin-Zelensky meeting in Miami “impossible.”
The envoys’ proposal
The trilateral idea has been pushed hardest by Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
After a September 5 meeting with Putin at the Kremlin and a follow-up trip to Kyiv, Kushner told reporters that he and Witkoff thought it would be “productive” to “go back to the trilateral format, which we were able to do about six months ago”.
Peskov’s Wednesday briefing repeated the Kremlin’s standing demand that any three-way summit be preceded by delegation-level negotiations producing results ready for the leaders to sign, rather than a meeting arranged from Washington.
