Trump says Putin meeting being arranged before inauguration

Donald Trump has confirmed that a meeting with Vladimir Putin is being arranged, offering no date but making clear the encounter will happen soon after he takes office on 20 January. Speaking to Republican governors at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, the president-elect described the war in Ukraine as a "bloody mess" and said Putin "wants to meet" and "we are setting it up". The Kremlin responded within hours, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov telling reporters that Putin remains open to contact with the US president and that Moscow sets no preconditions beyond "mutual desire and political will to solve problems through dialogue".

A timeline measured in days

The exchange matters because it compresses the diplomatic calendar. Trump will be sworn in ten days from the date of these remarks. Any substantive discussion with Putin before or immediately after inauguration would mark a sharp break from the Biden administration's policy of isolating Moscow while arming Kyiv. The Biden White House has committed more than $175 billion in aid to Ukraine since February 2022, including over $60 billion in security assistance. Trump has repeatedly criticised the scale of that support and promised a swift end to the fighting, though he has never published a concrete peace plan.

What he has floated in private, according to multiple US press reports, is a settlement that would cede large parts of eastern and southern Ukraine to Russian control for the foreseeable future. That aligns with his public sympathy for the Russian argument that NATO enlargement created the security crisis. On Tuesday he told reporters that Russia had "for many, many years, long before Putin" opposed Ukrainian NATO membership, and that he could "understand their feelings" about having the alliance "right on their doorstep" after Biden insisted Kyiv should be able to join.

The NATO spending demand

The same appearance at Mar-a-Lago produced a second headline: Trump called for NATO members to raise defence expenditure to five percent of gross domestic product, more than double the alliance's current two percent guideline. Most European allies have only recently reached that lower threshold after years of pressure from Washington. A jump to five percent would imply an additional hundreds of billions of euros annually across the European members, a level not seen since the Cold War. NATO's own defence expenditure data shows only a handful of members, Poland, Estonia, Greece and the United States, currently exceed three percent.

The demand serves two purposes. It signals to Moscow that Trump intends to strengthen the alliance's military weight, while simultaneously pressuring European capitals to assume a far larger share of the burden. Whether the threat to "revisit" US commitment to Article 5 is credible remains an open question, but the rhetoric alone unsettles eastern flank members who rely on the American nuclear umbrella.

Kyiv's calculation

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has approached the Trump transition with a mix of flattery and realism. In a November interview with Sky News he said the "hot phase" of the war could end if NATO offered security guarantees for the territory Ukraine currently controls, leaving the return of occupied land to later diplomacy. That is a significant concession from a leader who once insisted on the restoration of 1991 borders before any ceasefire. It also reflects Kyiv's awareness that US ammunition stocks and financial support may not survive a Trump presidency at their current level.

Zelenskyy has also had to absorb Trump's personal disparagement. The president-elect has repeatedly mocked him as a "salesman" and rarely criticises Putin by name. That dynamic worries European capitals, which fear a US-Russia bilateral deal that sidelines both Ukraine and the EU. The French and German governments have both insisted in recent weeks that any negotiation must include Kyiv and respect European security interests.

Moscow's position

The Kremlin's response was notably unconditional. Peskov's statement that "no conditions are required" suggests Putin sees an opening to reset the relationship without conceding on his maximalist goals: Ukrainian neutrality, recognition of annexed territories, and limits on Western military presence in eastern Europe. Russia's economy has absorbed two years of sanctions and reoriented towards war production; Putin may calculate that time is on his side if US support for Kyiv wavers. But he also needs relief from the technology and financial restrictions that constrain his defence industrial base.

A direct Trump-Putin summit would be their first since Helsinki in 2018. That meeting produced no joint statement and was widely criticised in Washington for Trump's public deference to Putin over US intelligence assessments. The optics of a second encounter, days into a new presidency, will be scrutinised for any sign that the US is prepared to recognise Russian territorial gains.

European exposure

Europe has the most to lose from a hasty settlement. The EU and its members have provided roughly €85 billion in financial, humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine, according to the European Council's Ukraine support tracker. They also host more than six million Ukrainian refugees. A ceasefire that freezes the front line leaves the continent with a militarised border stretching from the Black Sea to the Arctic, a sanctions regime that may fracture, and a reconstruction bill estimated by the World Bank at over $400 billion.

European leaders have spent the past month trying to secure a place at any future table. The UK, France, Germany and Poland have all signalled willingness to contribute peacekeeping forces under a UN or OSCE mandate, but only if the settlement includes credible security guarantees. The EU's own defence industry is still ramping up; the European Defence Fund and the Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP) are only beginning to deliver capacity.