President Donald Trump is “optimistic” he can achieve peace in Ukraine on the heels of the successful hostage exchange in the Middle East, a White House official told POLITICO.
Trump has a meeting scheduled with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday, part of a weeklong coordinated effort by the Ukrainians to turn the administration’s attention from the Middle East to Russia.
The two presidents will discuss Kyiv’s request for Tomahawks and other additional armaments and air defense systems, energy resilience and increasing cooperation on drone production, Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S. said in a statement.
U.S. and Ukrainian officials will hold bilateral discussions ahead of the White House meeting.
“We have multiple Ukrainian delegations working to maximize the impact of the leaders’ meeting this Friday,” Olga Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s new ambassador to the U.S., told POLITICO. “This is a completely new format of engagement: military teams have been working for two weeks, the Prime Minister is engaging with financial partners to coordinate efforts; economy and energy delegations are focusing on mitigating the effects of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure by mobilizing U.S. engagement in gas procurement.”
Zelenskyy on Monday told Ukrainian reporters that Trump advised him to meet with energy companies while in Washington. The Ukrainian leader also intends to speak with military companies and congressional leaders during his visit. Top of mind for Zelenskyy will be protecting Ukrainian infrastructure from ongoing Russian missile attacks, he said, though he did not mention who specifically he would meet with on his trip.
Trump has often lamented that the Russia-Ukraine war has been much harder to solve than he had originally thought – but that calculus could change now that the administration is hopeful after its success in the Middle East.
“President Trump has long expressed his desire to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, just like he freed the hostages and ended the war between Israel and Hamas,” said the White House official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the administration’s thinking.
Zelenskyy appears anxious to seize on the administration’s momentum, saying Tuesday in an address to the nation that there is “strong momentum for peace in the world now.”
“The US president himself, his team did a lot, various leaders were also involved, they helped a lot,” Zelenskyy continued. “And now there are serious chances to live without war in the Middle East. This shows that Russia can really be pressured to stop aggression.”
The White House official stressed that Russia should be motivated to come to the table due to their military and economic positions.
“As the President stated, the war hasn’t been going well for Russia, whose economy is in shambles and who continue to lose thousands of lives to gain ‘virtually no land.’ If they were smart, they would more urgently pursue a deal to end the war which has done significant damage to Russia’s reputation, stop the killing, and get their country back on the right track. President Putin has repeatedly rejected generous proposals toward peace that would have benefited Russia,” the official said.
“The President remains optimistic that he will be able to get both sides to stop the senseless killing.”
Of course, Trump has said as much before — most recently claiming, following a few days of whirlwind diplomacy in August, that Putin and Zelenskyy had agreed to meet. That meeting never took place.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy and lead negotiator in the Middle East and Europe, has told foreign counterparts that the president’s three big foreign policy goals for his second term were ending the conflict in Gaza, ending the war between Russia and Ukraine and agreeing to a new nuclear deal with Iran, according to a person in close touch with the president’s national security team.
“They recognized that Gaza was going to be the simplest of the three,” the person said. “But they’re not giving up on the others. If anything, there’s a sense that success will lead to more success.”
Stefanishyna, the Ukrainian ambassador, said the effort by Kyiv to engage with the White House, lawmakers and business interests in Washington is meant to “reveal the potential for a global political surge to end the war.”
Stefanishyna told POLITICO that teams of Ukrainian officials, including Ukraine’s defense minister Rustem Umerov and Zelenskyy’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak, who arrived in Washington Monday, have been preparing for conversations centering around boosting Ukraine’s air defenses, long-range capacities, the resilience of its energy sector and a call for additional sanctions on Russia.
She also teased an announcement of additional arms deliveries to Ukraine under the new Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) initiative, established earlier this year by NATO to mediate and pay for the delivery of American weapons to Ukraine. Additionally, the ambassador telegraphed a willingness to expand economic ties beyond the minerals deal signed earlier this year through a technology-sharing agreement that would give the U.S. access to Ukrainian drone technologies.
“This partnership is not only a strategic advantage for Ukraine but also a real contribution to U.S. and allied security globally,” she said.
Trump’s breakthrough in the Middle East may have reinforced his own diplomatic self-belief, but so far Russia has been largely unresponsive to his peacemaking efforts.
Trump, working closely with Arab partners, was able to pressure a weakened Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into accepting his ceasefire agreement after Hamas agreed to it in part. But he has far less leverage over Putin, who is less reliant on the U.S. generally and more impervious to the kind of domestic political pressure that democratically-elected leaders face.
Trump has publicly acknowledged Zelenskyy’s interest in Tomahawk missiles, suggesting that he could opt to provide them to Ukraine as a consequence for Putin’s continued refusal to engage in substantive peace talks. But he has also mentioned the escalation risk of an expanded conflict should Russia, which is concerned about longer-range Tomahawks’ capacity to strike Moscow, view Ukraine’s deployment of additional American weapons as the U.S. participating more fully in the war.
Asked Tuesday about his upcoming meeting with Zelenskyy, Trump reiterated his oft-stated befuddlement about Putin’s determination to keep fighting.
“Vladimir and I had a good relationship, probably still do,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I don’t know why he continues with this war … He’s got to really settle this war … He just doesn’t want to end that war.”
Veronika Melkozerova contributed to this report.
