A man wanted for war crimes sitting across the table from the leader of the country he invaded?
That is the spectacle that President Donald Trump is pushing to arrange in the next few weeks, convinced he can break the deadlock between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy with a summit that could help forge an end to the Kremlin’s war.
The plan, however, is tangled from the start.
Some European leaders maintain that no such meeting should take place before Russia agrees to a ceasefire. Many analysts doubt that Putin will actually agree to meet with Zelenskyy. And even if he does, there’s the fraught subject of where to hold the negotiations, given that Putin faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Kremlin plays it cool
Trump revealed Monday that he called the Russian leader “to begin the arrangements” during his White House meeting with Zelenskyy and a posse of European leaders.
The president doubled down Tuesday, telling “Fox & Friends” that he hoped “Putin is going to be good,” adding: “I sort of set it up with Putin and Zelenskyy, and you know, they’re the ones that have to call the shots. We’re 7,000 miles away.”
Trump seemed eager to accelerate the timeline of the mooted talks. “I think it will be fairly soon,” Finnish President Alexander Stubb told NBC News, adding that he hoped it could happen “within the next two weeks.”
Moscow, however, poured its customary cold water on the excitement.
“We do not reject any formats: neither bilateral nor trilateral,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. But he warned that any summit would have to be prepared “step by step, gradually, starting with the expert level and then going through all the necessary steps.”
Lavrov, speaking to State TV channel Rossiya-24, added that “contacts involving top officials must be prepared with the utmost care.”
Location TBD
Zelenskyy said he is “ready” to meet Putin, but it’s unclear where such a meeting would take place.
Putin faces an arrest warrant, issued by the ICC in 2023, over the alleged war crime of illegally deporting Ukrainian children. That obligates the 125 countries that are party to the court under the Rome Statute to arrest the Russian leader and transfer him to The Hague for trial if he sets foot on their territory.
Moscow has repeatedly denied accusations that its forces have committed atrocities in Ukraine, and the Kremlin branded the court decision “null and void.”
Trump said Monday the location was “to be determined,” and the search for a neutral venue has already turned into its own diplomatic guessing game.
Switzerland, already floated by Stubb and French President Emmanuel Macron as a potential venue, raised its hand.
Despite being an ICC signatory, Switzerland could welcome Putin for a summit given that he would be coming for peace purposes, said Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis.
“The goal of receiving Mr. Putin in Switzerland without him being arrested is one hundred percent achievable,” Cassis told Swiss national broadcaster SRF.
Austria’s leader also offered his country, which stood at the divide of communist Eastern Europe and the capitalist West during the Cold War.
“We stand ready to offer our good services,” Chancellor Christian Stocker posted on X.
Hungary may also be in play.
Its parliament voted to quit the ICC in April, which could allow Putin to attend without risk of arrest. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has also remained one of the Kremlin’s few friends in Europe amid the war, though that may make it less appealing to Kyiv.
But obstacles remain: Any Putin flight to Switzerland or Hungary risks passing over countries that might not be so forgiving if his plane had to make an emergency landing.
Safer bets could be Turkey, which has hosted past summits between Ukraine and Russia, or Qatar, which is already used to hosting fraught negotiations between warring parties as the venue for talks between Israel and Hamas. Turkey and Qatar are not members of the ICC.
Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser, suggested that a summit could take place at the end of August and that Saudi Arabia could play host.
The U.S. is also not an ICC signatory, and Putin and Zelenskyy have traveled there in recent days.
Whether a venue will even need to be chosen is another matter.
While not “impossible,” a meeting between the two leaders would be “a big surprise,” Keir Giles, a senior fellow at the London-based think tank Chatham House, told NBC News.
Putin has “carefully avoided” meeting Zelensky until now, he said in a phone interview, “because doing so conflicts with his narrative of Ukraine not being a proper country and Zelenskyy not being a legitimate leader.”
Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, a Berlin-based think tank, echoed those doubts. A meeting would be “pointless” for Putin and will not happen “under the current circumstances,” she wrote on X.
Putin “has repeatedly stated that such a meeting would only be possible if there were well-prepared grounds, which in practice means Zelenskyy’s acceptance of Russia’s terms for ending the war,” she said.
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