Trump says Putin and Zelenskyy are 'not ready' for peace as Europe faces pressure to step up

NBC News · 04 Sep 2025

With the United States seemingly content to take a back seat, a high-level meeting in Paris on Thursday will seek to answer the question: Can European powers step up and bring Ukraine and Russia closer to peace?

An actual halt in fighting seems an increasingly distant ambition, with President Donald Trump — who will call into the meeting in the French capital — conceding that while he remained hopeful of progress, the two sides were clearly “not ready yet” to make a deal.

And Russian President Vladimir Putin said during a visit to Beijing on Wednesday that he will end the war by force if Ukraine does not agree to his demands. He suggested he would meet with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but only in Moscow.

With Trump adopting a lesser role after his peace push stalled out, European powers are hoping to plug the diplomatic gap.

They are meeting in Paris early Thursday as part of the informal “Coalition of the Willing” — nations that say they are prepared to underwrite the “security guarantees” Ukraine says it needs to be confident any future ceasefire would hold.

Hosting the talks, French President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday that after months of planning “we are ready as Europeans to offer security guarantees to Ukraine and the Ukrainian people the day a peace deal is signed.” He declined to offer further details, saying they were “extremely confidential.”

The meeting will include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, European President Ursula von der Leyen and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was due to attend but a technical problem forced his plane to turn around, meaning he will join the summit virtually.

According to details released by the French and Ukrainian sides, it will be followed by a call with Trump, who has said he is willing to offer American support as a “backstop” but that this initiative must be led by the Europeans.

For Trump, the war is proving harder to resolve than his one-time claim that he would be able to fix the situation in 24 hours. He has increasingly expressed disappointment and even anger toward Putin, but has repeatedly stopped short of imposing new sanctions against Moscow despite numerous threats.

After his push for a meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy appeared to have fallen apart, he conceded Wednesday that there was still a considerable chasm between the two leaders.

“I’ve been watching it, I’ve been seeing it, and I’ve been talking about it with President Putin and President Zelenskyy,” Trump said in a phone interview with CBS News. “Something is going to happen, but they are not ready yet. But something is going to happen. We are going to get it done.”

Since the Kremlin's full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has been bombed nightly by Russian missiles and drones and repeatedly said it is ready to call a ceasefire. Russia has rejected this, maintaining it won’t do so until Ukraine has fulfilled a set of demands that resemble surrender.

However Kyiv is still deeply wary of a ceasefire, warning it could be used by Russia to rearm, regroup and launch other attacks on Ukraine and neighboring countries in Europe.

That’s why it and other European powers say the much vaunted but knotty “security guarantees” are essential. This could come in the form of European peacekeeper troops being stationed in Ukraine to uphold the ceasefire, although this idea has so far been summarily rejected by Russia.

During his high-profile visit to China on Wednesday, Putin made no signal of shifting from his absolutist demands that Ukraine must surrender and come back into Moscow’s sphere of influence. He believes he is winning this conflict, throwing thousands of troops' lives into his "meat grinder" war machine each week, for the slowest of grinding battlefield gains.

Putin did say that “if common sense prevails, then it is possible to agree on an acceptable option for ending this conflict,” adding that Trump’s “sincere desire to find this solution” meant there is “a certain light at the end of the tunnel.”

However, he said, if Ukraine did not accept its demands “then we will have to solve all our tasks by force.”

Source: NBC News