Putin-Trump summit to take place within days, Russia says
The announcement comes a day after Putin met with Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff in the Kremlin for nearly three hours of talks
[MOSCOW] Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump will meet for summit talks within the next few days, the Kremlin said on Thursday (Aug 7).
Russia and the US have agreed on a venue for the meeting and “together with our American colleagues, we are starting to work on specific issues,” with the aim of holding the talks next week, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters. He said the location of the summit would be disclosed later.
The announcement came a day after Putin met with Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff in the Kremlin for nearly three hours of talks as the US pushed for an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Trump has threatened to hit purchasers of Russian oil with secondary tariffs unless Putin agreed to a truce by Friday in the war that’s now in its fourth year.
European equity benchmarks and US stock futures rallied on the news, with the Stoxx Europe 600 gaining 0.7 per cent. UBS’s Ukraine Reconstruction basket rose as much as 3.2 per cent, led by an 11 per cent advance in Raiffeisen Bank International. A Goldman Sachs basket of European defence stocks fell 4.9 per cent.
The euro rose to a session high of around US$1.17, before trimming gains to trade around US$1.168. Other European currencies also rallied, with the Polish zloty up as much as 0.6 per cent against the US dollar.
The meeting is “giving the euro and other European currencies a boost,” said Valentin Marinov, head of G10 FX strategy at Credit Agricole. “While the details around the Trump-Putin meeting are unclear, the apparent progress from yesterday could be seen as an encouraging sign that the hostilities in Ukraine could finally end and a period of recovery could start.”
BT in your inbox
Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox.
Ukraine’s US dollar bonds extended gains and were the best performers on Thursday across emerging and frontier markets tracked by Bloomberg.
The Moscow Exchange rose by more than 5 per cent with sanctioned Gazprom, Novatek and Aeroflot among the top performers. Russia’s ruble strengthened slightly to 79.375 against the US dollar at 12.25 pm in Moscow.
Witkoff raised the idea of a trilateral meeting involving Putin, Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, though Russia did not comment on that proposal, Ushakov said. Russia wants to focus first on the Putin-Trump summit, he said.
Trump said on Wednesday there was a “very good chance” he would meet with Putin and Zelenskiy soon in another bid to broker peace between the two countries.
The US president informed allies that he was considering a summit during a phone call earlier Wednesday that also included Zelenskiy. Trump was positive about the possibility of a ceasefire, according to several people with knowledge of the call.
He also suggested that Putin would be open to entering into peace talks in exchange for discussing land swaps, the people said.
Ukraine has not reacted so far to the Russian announcement of a summit. Zelenskiy said after the call with Trump that “we all need a lasting and reliable peace” while adding that “Russia must end the war that it itself started,” in a statement posted on social media.
Putin has laid claim to Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, as well as the eastern and southern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson that his troops don’t fully occupy.
The US had previously offered to recognise Crimea as Russian as part of any deal, and to effectively cede control of parts of other Ukrainian regions that Russia occupies. As part of those earlier proposals, control over areas of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson would be returned to Ukraine.
Putin and Witkoff also discussed Russia-US relations at their meeting and had noted that they could be developed in “a completely different, mutually beneficial scenario,” Ushakov said. BLOOMBERG
Share with us your feedback on BT's products and services
