Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he would be ready to join Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at a proposed summit in Hungary if he were invited.
The US and Russian presidents announced after their phone call on Thursday that they planned to hold talks on the war in Ukraine in Budapest, possibly in the coming weeks.
On Monday, Zelensky told reporters: “If it is an invitation in a format where we meet as three or, as it’s called, shuttle diplomacy… then in one format or another, we will agree”.
Meanwhile, media reports suggest his White House meeting with Trump on Friday descended into a “shouting match” – with the US side urging Ukraine to accept Russia’s terms to end the war.
Zelensky was guarded during his first press briefing since the talks, but still his comments made clear that there were large areas of disagreement between the two sides.
He described the meeting as frank, and said he had told Trump that his main aim was a just peace, not a quick peace.
He criticised Hungary as the location of the prospective Trump-Putin talks, saying the country’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban – who is seen by Kyiv and many EU leaders as a Kremlin ally – could not do “anything positive for Ukrainians or even provide a balanced contribution”.
When asked by reporters on Friday if Zelensky would be involved in the meeting in Budapest, Trump said he wanted to “make it comfortable for everybody”.
“We’ll be involved in threes, but it may be separated,” he said, adding the three leaders “have to get together”.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a “constructive” phone call on preparations for the Budapest summit, Moscow said on Monday.
Zelensky had hoped to secure US Tomahawk missiles to strike deep into Russia during his White House visit, but appeared to walk away empty-handed as Trump struck a non-committal tone on the matter.
