US Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke by telephone Tuesday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to prepare for the summit in Alaska between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the State Department said.
“Both sides confirmed their commitment to a successful event,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters.
Bruce confirmed that Putin had requested the meeting, which will take place on Friday in the US state of Alaska.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has described the meeting as a “personal victory” for Putin, who had been shunned by the West since his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Rubio, in a radio interview earlier Tuesday, rejected criticism of the summit.
Trump “feels like, ‘Look, I’ve got to look at this guy across the table. I need to see him face to face. I need to hear him one-on-one. I need to make an assessment by looking at him,'” Rubio told the “Sid and Friends” show.
“People have to understand — for President Trump, a meeting is not a concession,” Rubio said.
Trump has said any peace deal would involve “some swapping of territories to the betterment of both” Russia and Ukraine, which has up to now depended on the US as its main arms supplier.
But because all the areas being contested lie within Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky and his European Union allies fear that he will face pressure to give up far more than Russia does.
Trump’s administration tempered expectations on Tuesday for major progress toward a ceasefire, calling his meeting on Friday with Putin in Alaska a “listening exercise.”
Zelensky and most of his European counterparts have said a lasting peace cannot be secured without Ukraine at the negotiating table, and a deal must comply with international law, Ukraine’s sovereignty and its territorial integrity.
They will hold a virtual meeting with Trump on Wednesday to underscore those concerns before the Putin summit, the first US-Russia summit since 2021.
“An imitated rather than genuine peace will not hold for long and will only encourage Russia to seize even more territory,” Zelensky said in a statement on Tuesday.
Zelensky said Russia must agree to a ceasefire before territorial issues are discussed. He would reject any Russian proposal that Ukraine pull its troops from the eastern Donbas region and cede its defensive lines.
Asked why Zelensky was not joining the US and Russian leaders at the Alaska summit, a White House spokeswoman said on Tuesday that the bilateral meeting had been proposed by Putin, and that Trump accepted to get a “better understanding” of how to end the war.
“Only one party that’s involved in this war is going to be present, and so this is for the president to go and to get a more firm and better understanding of how we can hopefully bring this war to an end,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. “You need both countries to agree to a deal.”
