WASHINGTON — President Trump confirmed Friday that he will meet one-on-one with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska next week in yet another attempt to end Moscow’s 41-month-old invasion of Ukraine.
“We’re going to have a meeting with Russia, start off with Russia, and we’ll announce a location,” Trump told reporters at the White House.
“I think the location will be a very popular one, for a lot of reasons, but we’ll be announcing that a little bit later,” the president added. ““It would have been sooner, but I guess there’s security arrangements that unfortunately people have to make. Otherwise I’d do it much quicker. He would, too. He’d like to meet as soon as possible. I agree with it.”
Trump subsequently confirmed the date and place in a post on Truth Social.
“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,” the president wrote.
“Further details to follow. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” he added.
The president had suggested a day earlier that he would be willing to meet face-to-face with Putin before bringing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into talks, contradicting statements made earlier to The Post by White House officials.
The meeting would be the first US-Russia bilateral since former President Joe Biden met Putin at Geneva, Switzerland in June 2021.
Trump and Putin last met face-to-face in 2019, on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan.
News of a Trump summit with Putin worried Ukrainians who spoke to The Post, but the US president’s words stoked some hope that a reported proposal described by one official as the Kremlin’s “wishlist” would not be forced on Kyiv.
The unlikely pitch would have required Ukraine to cede Crimea and all of its Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts — or regions — to Putin, including the roughly 33% of those two regions that Russia has not been able to capture, an informed source told The Post.
But the floated deal would violate not only US law, but also the Ukrainian constitution, which prohibits the recognition of any of Kyiv’s post-Soviet territory being seized by another country.
Not only is the US government prohibited by law from recognizing Russian sovereignty claims, but related economic sanctions on the pro-Moscow leaders of those regions cannot be lifted without the consent of Congress, according to another US source.
“Any recognition, especially sanctions relief, would be a very heavy lift,” this person told The Post.
Asked Friday whether he was “surprised that `Zelensky hasn’t figured out by now, in years of war, how to deal with you and to deal with Putin without needing permission to make concessions from his Parliament or from a national referendum,” Trump didn’t take the bait.
“In all fairness to President Zelensky, he’s getting everything he needs to, assuming we get something done,” Trump said.
The president, 79, previously imposed a Friday deadline on Putin to reach a cease-fire with Ukraine or face secondary sanctions connected to Russian energy sales.
The president announced an additional 25% tariff on India related to its oil purchases earlier this week, to take effect Aug. 27.
No other sanctions had been announced as of Friday evening.
