“Putin is ready to meet when the agenda is ready for a summit, and this agenda is not ready at all,” Lavrov said, echoing Moscow’s established rhetoric about a leaders’ meeting being impossible unless certain conditions were met.
Asked for his response to Lavrov’s comments and what the next steps could be, Trump told reporters at a White House event on Friday, Washington time: “Well, we’ll see. We’re going to see if Putin and Zelensky will be working together. It’s like oil and vinegar, a little bit.
“It’ll be interesting to see. If they don’t, why didn’t they have a meeting, because I told them to have a meeting. But I’ll know what I am going to do in two weeks.”
Trump had taken sanctions off the table ahead of the Anchorage meeting with Putin. But at the same White House event where he mentioned possible sanctions, he showed a photograph of his meeting with Putin in Alaska, saying the Russian leader wanted to attend the World Cup 2026 soccer tournament in the United States.
Trump displays an image of himself with Putin last week, and said the Russian leader had expressed the desire to attend the soccer World Cup in the US next year.Credit: AP
“I’m going to sign this for him. But I was sent one, and I thought you would like to see it; it’s a man named Vladimir Putin, who I believe will be coming, depending on what happens. He may be coming, and he may not, depending on what happens,” Trump said.
Trump’s comments did not address the fact that Russia was banned from international competitions such as the World Cup after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and has not taken part in qualification for the 2026 tournament, which will be hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico.
Putin hails ‘meaningful’ meeting
Meanwhile, in his first public remarks about Trump since the Alaska meeting, Putin said the president’s leadership qualities would help restore US-Russia relations.
“With the arrival of President Trump, I think that a light at the end of the tunnel has finally loomed. And now we had a very good, meaningful and frank meeting in Alaska,” Putin said during a visit to a nuclear weapons research centre on Friday.
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Thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been killed since Russia launched its 2022 full-scale invasion. Analysts estimate that more than a million soldiers on both sides have been killed or wounded, and fighting is continuing unabated, with both sides also attacking energy facilities.
Russia has maintained its longstanding demand for Ukraine to give up land it still holds in two eastern regions as a prerequisite for peace, while proposing to freeze the front line in two more southerly regions and possibly hand back small areas in other regions.
European leaders cheered Trump’s tone at the White House meeting last Monday when he made vague promises to back European security guarantees for postwar Ukraine. But uncertainty has grown about Putin’s commitment to peace-making efforts as Russian officials raised objections about the cornerstones of the proposals up for negotiation.
Ukraine wants Western security guarantees to deter any future Russian attack, and US and European officials are scrambling to come up with detailed proposals on how that might work. Lavrov earlier this week said that making security arrangements for Ukraine without Moscow’s involvement was pointless.
“[Putin] hasn’t moderated his position in any significant way,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and former British ambassador to Belarus.
The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, meanwhile, accused Russia of “dragging its feet”, saying it was clear that Moscow did not want peace.
“President Trump has been repeatedly saying that the killing has to stop, and Putin is just laughing, not stopping the killing, but increasing the killing,” she told the BBC.
AP, Reuters
