WASHINGTON: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky meets Donald Trump at the White House Friday, seeking US-made Tomahawk missiles even as the US president reaches out to Russia\u2019s Vladimir Putin for a fresh summit.<\/p>\n
Zelensky will be making his third trip to Washington since Trump returned to office, following a disastrous televised shouting match in February and a make-up meeting in August, as the US leader\u2019s stance on the war blows hot and cold.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s latest pivot came on the eve of Zelensky\u2019s visit. He announced that he would be meeting Putin in Budapest, in a fresh bid to reach a peace deal and end Moscow\u2019s invasion launched in 2022.<\/p>\n
Ukraine had hoped Zelensky\u2019s trip would be more about adding to the pressure on Putin, especially by getting American-made long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles that can strike deep into Russia.<\/p>\n
But Trump, who once said he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, appears set on pursuing a new diplomatic breakthrough to follow the Gaza ceasefire deal that he brokered last week.<\/p>\n
Trump said Thursday he had a \u201cvery productive\u201d call with Putin and that they would meet in the Hungarian capital within the next two weeks. He added that he hoped to have \u201cseparate but equal\u201d meetings with both Putin and Zelensky but did not elaborate.<\/p>\n
Zelensky said as he arrived Thursday in Washington that he hoped Trump\u2019s success with the Gaza deal would bring results to end the war that has left swathes of his own country in ruins.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe expect that the momentum of curbing terror and war that succeeded in the Middle East will help to end Russia\u2019s war against Ukraine,\u201d Zelensky said on X.<\/p>\n
Zelensky insisted that the threat of Tomahawks had forced Moscow to negotiate.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can already see that Moscow is rushing to resume dialogue as soon as it hears about Tomahawks,\u201d Zelensky said, adding that he\u2019ll also be meeting US defense companies to discuss additional supplies of air defense systems.<\/p>\n
\u2019Didn\u2019t like it\u2019<\/p>\n
Trump however cast doubt on whether Ukraine would ever get the coveted weapons, which have a 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) range.<\/p>\n
Trump told reporters on Thursday that the United States could not \u201cdeplete\u201d its own supply. \u201cWe need them too, so I don\u2019t know what we can do about that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The US president said the Russian leader \u201cdidn\u2019t like it\u201d when he raised the possibility during their call of giving Tomahawks to Ukraine.<\/p>\n
The Kremlin said on Thursday it was making immediate preparations for a Budapest summit after what it called the \u201cextremely frank and trustful\u201d Putin-Trump call.<\/p>\n
But Putin told Trump that giving Ukraine Tomahawks would \u201cnot change the situation on the battlefield\u201d and would harm \u201cprospects for peaceful resolution,\u201d the Russian president\u2019s top aide Yuri Ushakov told journalists.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s relations with Putin \u2014 a leader for whom he has repeatedly expressed admiration over the years \u2014 and Zelensky have swung wildly since he returned to the White House in January.<\/p>\n
After an initial rapprochement, Trump has shown increasing frustration with Putin, particularly since he came away from meeting the Russian president in Alaska with no end to the war in sight.<\/p>\n
Zelensky meanwhile has gone the opposite way, winning back Trump\u2019s support after the disastrous Oval Office encounter when the US president and Vice President JD Vance berated him in front of the cameras.<\/p>\n
The Ukrainian returned in August \u2014 wearing a suit after he was mocked for not wearing one in the first meeting \u2014 and accompanied by a host of Western leaders in solidarity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky meets Donald Trump at the White House Friday, seeking US-made Tomahawk missiles even as the US president reaches out to Russia\u2019s Vladimir Putin for a fresh summit. Zelensky will be making his third trip to Washington since Trump returned to office, following a disastrous televised shouting match in February and …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":88305,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88293"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88310,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88293\/revisions\/88310"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}