(The Hill/NEXSTAR) – President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to the media after their highly-anticipated meeting Friday afternoon, with Trump calling the summit “productive.”
Trump did not detail a solid agreement, but said he would be reaching out to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other key allies to give a readout of the summit in Alaska.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said he and President Donald Trump have reached an “understanding” on Ukraine and warned Europe not to “torpedo the nascent progress.”
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What was previously planned to be a one-on-one between Trump and Putin turned into a three-on-three meeting that included top U.S. advisors Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff.
Trump and Putin spoke for more than two and a half hours before breaking to hold a joint news conference.
Putin was joined by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov. The change indicates that the White House is taking a more guarded approach than it did during a 2018 meeting in Helsinki, when Trump and Putin first met privately just with their interpreters for two hours.
In what was their first face-to-face interaction since the first Trump administration, Trump and Putin met each other on the tarmac at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson outside Anchorage. Trump clapped as Putin approached, the two greeting each other warmly with a handshake.
The two leaders declined to take questions from the media before getting into “the Beast,” the president’s official armored car. Trump and Putin sat side-by-side in the back seat as they headed to the meeting site.
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Earlier in the day, Trump posted “HIGH STAKES!!!” on his Truth Social platform. Russia seemed to agree, as Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, reposted Trump on the social platform X and commented, “True.”
Trump said earlier Friday that he would not use the meeting as a platform to negotiate for Ukraine and threatened to “walk away” from the conversation if Putin is not willing to make a peace deal that the U.S. finds acceptable.
“I think it’s going to work out very well — and if it doesn’t, I’m going to head back home real fast,” he told Fox News’s Bret Baier aboard Air Force One.
The comments come days after the president sought to reassure European allies that he would not advocate for a land swap between Russia and Ukraine.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
