Trump announces he’ll meet with Putin in Alaska next friday

U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he plans to meet with Russian leader Vladimir Putin next Friday in Alaska, as Trump looks to broker a ceasefire agreement in hopes of bringing an end to the war in Ukraine.

“The highly anticipated meeting between myself, as president of the United States of America, and President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, will take place next Friday, August 15, 2025, in the Great State of Alaska,” Trump wrote in a social media post. “Further details to follow.”

Earlier Friday, Trump announced his plans to hold the meeting during a summit with Armenia and Azerbaijan at the White House and indicated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy may not be involved.

“We’re going to have a meeting with Russia, start off with Russia,” Trump said.

The face-to-face summit with Putin represents a high-stakes gamble for the U.S. president, who on the campaign trail pledged to bring a quick end to the war only to see his efforts repeatedly stymied. Trump said Friday he believed “we’re getting very close” to a peace deal.

Ukrainian allies have worried that Trump will be too willing to offer concessions to the Putin, who has claimed Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, as well as the eastern and southern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson that his troops don’t fully occupy.

People familiar with the discussions between Washington and Moscow say negotiators have circled around a deal that would lock in Russia’s occupation of territory seized during its military invasion.

Trump on Friday acknowledged that he saw a land swap as a likely part of any agreement.

“So we’re looking at that, but we’re actually looking to get some back and some swapping – complicated – it’s actually nothing easy,” Trump said. “It’s very complicated. But we’re going to get some back. We’re going to get some some switched. There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both and but we’ll be talking about that either later or tomorrow or whatever.”

Zelenskyy has long said he’s not prepared to cede any of Ukraine’s territory, while demanding Russia withdraw its troops and pay reparations for the devastation inflicted on the country since the February 2022 invasion. Trump cast the Ukrainian leader as willing to work toward concluding a deal.

“President Zelenskyy has to get all of – his everything he needs, because he’s going to have to get ready to sign something and I think he is working hard to get that done,” Trump said.

The U.S. had previously offered to recognize Crimea as Russian as part of any deal, and to effectively cede control of parts of other Ukrainian regions that Russia occupies. As part of those earlier proposals, control over areas of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson would be returned to Ukraine.

Trump has long faced accusations from critics that his cozy relationship with Putin has blinded him to the Russian leader’s true intentions, including as he repeatedly criticized U.S. aid to Ukraine during the Biden Administration. A 2018 meeting in Helsinki, in which Trump said he believed Putin over U.S. intelligence officials who had concluded Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, drew bipartisan condemnation in Washington.

But Trump has toughened his tone toward Putin in recent weeks, expressing frustration that the Russian leader seemed unwilling to cease hostilities.

Brokering a lasting peace deal would amount to a major political victory for Trump, who has increasingly sought to leverage economic pressure to solve foreign policy crises. In recent days the U.S. president has announced an additional 25% tariff on India over its purchase of crude oil from Russia, and threatened to impose sanctions and other penalties against Moscow if Putin did not agree to a ceasefire.

Still, the worry for Zelenskyy and his European allies is that Putin may persuade Trump to concede too much in reaching a settlement. They also have a multitude of doubts about how any agreement might be enforced and what security guarantees Ukraine will receive.

Momentum toward a meeting between Trump and Putin quickened after the Russian president met with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff for nearly three hours of talks in the Kremlin earlier this week. U.S., European and Ukrainian officials have spent recent days discussing their response to those talks.