President Donald Trump said Thursday night that he and Vladimir Putin held a “very productive” phone call that will jump-start a fresh diplomatic track on the war in Ukraine, framing the exchange as a direct outgrowth of his recent Middle East breakthrough.

Trump announced the plans on Truth Social following a lengthy phone call with Putin:

“President Putin and I will then meet in an agreed upon location, Budapest, Hungary, to see if we can bring this ‘inglorious’ War, between Russia and Ukraine, to an end. President Zelenskyy and I will be meeting tomorrow, in the Oval Office, where we will discuss my conversation with President Putin, and much more. I believe great progress was made with today’s telephone conversation,” the president added.

Trump cast the conversation as forward-leaning rather than performative: he said both sides agreed their senior advisers would meet next week, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio leading the U.S. delegation, and that he and Putin would then sit down in Budapest to test whether a durable cease-fire and political framework are within reach.

Trump also said he will host Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House on Friday to brief him on the call and to discuss what a credible off-ramp might require. The president added that he and Putin spoke at length about reviving U.S.–Russia trade “when the war with Ukraine is over,” and he claimed “great progress” from the exchange.

The Budapest marker is deliberate. Hungary has cultivated channels to Moscow while remaining inside NATO, and its capital has become a favored venue for talks that need discretion more than choreography. Trump’s timeline, working-level meetings within days and a leaders’ session to follow, suggests an attempt to compress a process that has drifted for nearly three years into something with real stakes and deadlines.

There was no immediate readout from the Kremlin or Kyiv matching Trump’s account, and the hard questions remain the same: what security guarantees can be enforced, what territory will be contested, and how any deal would be verified. But Trump is arguing that the formula that secured a hostage release and truce architecture in Gaza, intense leader-to-leader pressure, allied mediators, and economic incentives, can be adapted to Europe’s deadliest conflict since the 1990s. And he might be successful yet again.

The post also included a flourish of personal diplomacy: Trump said Putin thanked First Lady Melania Trump for her work involving children and “was very appreciative,” a small detail meant to telegraph warmer atmospherics around talks.

For now, Trump wants the headline to be motion, not drift. “I believe great progress was made,” he wrote, insisting that the same political capital he spent to pry open a door in the Middle East can be spent again, this time to test whether the combatants in Ukraine are ready to try the do-or-deal diplomacy they have avoided. 

By I. Constantin