By Ryan Morgan
A one-on-one meeting between warring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin may not be likely any time soon, President Donald Trump assessed in an Aug. 29 interview.
Sitting down with The Daily Caller, Trump said a meeting between the Ukrainian and Russian presidents is likely if the United States is there to moderate it, but not if the meeting is just up to Zelenskyy and Putin.
“A trilateral meeting would happen. A bilateral, I don’t know about, but a trilateral will happen. But, you know, sometimes people aren’t ready for it,” Trump said.
Trump’s assessment about a bilateral meeting marks a shift in tone just two weeks after he hosted Putin for an Aug. 15 meeting in Alaska, followed by an Aug. 18 meeting with Zelenskyy and other European leaders.
At the conclusion of his Aug. 18 meeting with Zelenskyy, Trump took to his Truth Social platform to call for Putin and Zelenskyy to hold a bilateral meeting, after which all three of them would hold a trilateral meeting to resolve the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict.
Since the Aug. 18 Trump–Zelenskyy meeting, Ukrainian authorities have reported continuing heavy Russian drone and missile barrages.
“The Russians are not choosing to end the war, only new strikes,” Zelenskyy wrote in an Aug. 28 X post following a particularly heavy nighttime barrage. “Overnight in Kyiv, dozens of buildings were damaged: residential houses, office centers, civilian enterprises.”
As Trump continued to speak with The Daily Caller about the ongoing conflict, he likened the warring countries to a pair of children fighting on a playground, and assessed that children sometimes need time to fight each other before they are broken up.
“You have a child, and there’s another child in the lot, in the playground, and they hate each other, and they start swinging, swinging, and swinging, and you want them to stop, and they keep going. After a little while, they’re very happy to stop. Do you understand that? It’s almost that way. Sometimes they have to fight for a little bit before you can get them to stop,” Trump said.
While he likened the conflict to a playground fight, Trump reiterated his desire to stop the fighting and see an end to the loss of life.
“This has been going on for a long time. A lot of people are dead,” he told The Daily Caller.
During the interview, Trump also reiterated his willingness to support some form of post-war security framework for Ukraine. He said he didn’t want to put U.S. boots on the ground as part of such a security guarantee, but expressed openness to a framework that might involve U.S. aircraft.
“There are five to 7,000, mostly young people, being killed every single week. If I could stop that and have a plane flying around the air every once in a while—it’s going to be mostly the Europeans—but we, we’d help them,” Trump said.
