Trump speaks of great progress on Russia and Witkoff is optimistic about the meeting with the Europeans

US President Donald Trump on Sunday announced “significant progress” on Russia following a summit with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, while his special envoy Steve Witkoff expressed optimism about a White House meeting on Monday with Ukraine’s president and European leaders.

Trump and Putin met on Friday at a US military base in Alaska, their first summit since the US president returned to the White House.

Discussions focused on finding a settlement to the war Moscow waged against Kyiv in 2022.

While the two leaders didn’t announce any concrete agreements after the meeting, Trump will host his counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, and a number of European leaders at the White House on Monday to discuss the results of his meeting with Putin and the prospects for a settlement in Ukraine.

Trump spoke of making great progress on Russia, “Big progress on Russia,” he wrote on Truth Social on Sunday, without providing further details.

However, Witkoff expressed optimism about tomorrow’s meeting, in statements to CNN, hoping it would be fruitful.

The special envoy, who participated in the summit between Trump and Putin, also confirmed that Moscow had made concessions regarding Ukrainian regions it had previously declared annexation.

“I’m optimistic that we’ll have a fruitful meeting on Monday,” Witkoff said.

“We’ll reach a real consensus… We’ll be able to go back to the Russians and push forward with this peace agreement and finalize it,” to end the war that began with the Russian invasion in early 2022.

The US envoy, who has previously visited Moscow several times and met with Putin, continued, “The Russians have made some concessions… on all five of these areas”.

Witkoff is likely referring to the Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions, which Russia declared annexed after the invasion began, despite not having full military control over them, and the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014.

Witkoff stressed on Sunday that Trump and Putin agreed on robust security guarantees for Ukraine during their summit in Alaska.

He said, “We agreed on robust security guarantees that I would describe as game-changing”.

The meeting between Trump, Zelensky, and European leaders on Monday aims to discuss ways to end the most violent conflict in Europe since the end of World War II.

These guarantees, which Ukraine is demanding as part of any settlement with Russia, are expected to be a key focus of Monday’s meeting at the White House, which will be attended by French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, and others.

Following the summit with Putin, Trump abandoned his call for a ceasefire in Ukraine, which had been his position for months, and now believes the best course of action is to work toward a comprehensive peace agreement that would permanently end the war.

For his part, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told NBC that a ceasefire “hasn’t been withdrawn” from the options on the table, but that “what we aim for is to end the war”.

Rubio warned of repercussions, including the possibility of imposing new sanctions on Russia, if a peace agreement isn’t reached.

“If we can’t reach an agreement in the end, there will be repercussions,” he said, adding, “Not just the repercussions of the ongoing war, but the repercussions of all those ongoing sanctions and potential new ones on top of them”.