WASHINGTON, September 26 — President Donald Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to travel to Moscow for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Zelenskyy declined, according to Bloomberg. The reported refusal is the latest turn in a relationship that has repeatedly placed Ukraine at the center of American domestic politics, and it lands as the White House presses for an end to the war Russia launched in February 2022.
The through-line in Trump’s Ukraine policy is a willingness to use both personal diplomacy and economic pressure, and the resistance he has encountered from Kyiv. The current episode fits that pattern: a U.S. president seeking a high-profile meeting with Putin, and a Ukrainian leader declining to travel to the Russian capital.
The 2019 backdrop
The first defining moment came in 2019, when a whistleblower complaint about Trump’s July 25, 2019 phone call with Zelenskyy triggered an impeachment inquiry in the U.S. House of Representatives. Trump was impeached in December 2019 on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress; the Republican-controlled Senate acquitted him in February 2020. The call involved Trump pressing Zelenskyy to investigate then-candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, while a hold was placed on U.S. security assistance to Ukraine.
That history is the backdrop for the current diplomacy.
Sanctions, pressure and the peace push
Trump, who returned to the White House in January 2025, has repeatedly said he wants to end the war quickly. Zelenskyy has looked to Trump in a push to end the war in Ukraine before winter, according to fox23.com. In the summer of 2025, Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on Brazil over its handling of the trial of former President Jair Bolsonaro — an example of his aggressive use of economic pressure that has shaped how allies and adversaries view his foreign policy.
At the United Nations, Trump signaled an aggressive lame-duck foreign policy, according to Roll Call, under the headline “Into hell.” His administration has also imposed new U.S. sanctions on Russia. The Kremlin said the sanctions will harm Ukraine peace talks and bilateral ties, according to The Moscow Times.
Putin has escalated Russia’s confrontation with Ukraine and the West, Foreign Affairs reported. Zelenskyy is expected to warn that Russia’s aggression will not stop at Ukraine’s borders, according to The New York Times.
What to watch
The broader stakes now turn on whether Washington can convert pressure into a negotiating track that Kyiv will accept. Trump’s claim that the world respects him has been undercut by a new survey, which found that leaders do not stand up for him at international gatherings as he has claimed. For now, the calculus in Kyiv and Moscow rests on a single unanswered question: whether a U.S.-brokered meeting with Putin can be arranged on terms Zelenskyy is willing to accept.
