Overview

• During an Aug. 18 White House session with Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders, President Trump phoned Vladimir Putin and said he began arranging a Russia–Ukraine leaders’ meeting, and NATO chief Mark Rutte later said Putin agreed to meet.
• NATO says roughly 30 countries, including Japan and Australia, are negotiating a package of security guarantees for Ukraine with U.S. participation, and Zelensky indicated details could be finalized in about 10 days.
• Russian aide Yuri Ushakov said Putin and Trump backed continuing direct talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations and discussed raising the level of participants, while Moscow publicly rejected NATO-led peacekeeping forces in Ukraine.
• After initially declining to rule out U.S. troop deployments when asked, Trump later told U.S. media he would not send American forces and proposed U.S. air-defense support for European countries that might deploy troops.
• European leaders welcomed renewed U.S. engagement yet voiced concern about potential pressure on Kyiv over territory, and many Ukrainians expressed distrust of paper guarantees given the Budapest Memorandum experience.