President Donald Trump said Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy will be involved in peace talks with Russia, a day after top U.S. advisers suggested the negotiations might go on without him.
“He will be involved, yes,” Trump said Sunday in response to reporters’ questions after attending the Daytona 500 car race in Florida. He didn’t specify whether Zelenskyy or his aides would attend preliminary talks this week in Saudi Arabia or during a later summit among the country’s leaders.
It was the first definitive statement from the White House that Ukraine would be permitted a seat at the table when the U.S. and Russia discuss ending the war, which started with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Trump, who had a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, said he doesn’t believe the Russian president has further territorial ambitions in Ukraine.
“No, I think he wants to stop,” Trump said. “That was my question to him, because if he was going to go on that would have been a big problem for us.”
Earlier, national security adviser Mike Waltz demurred when asked directly on Fox News Sunday whether Zelenskyy would be involved. Instead, he said the Ukrainian president would be “very wise” to accept Trump’s proposed deal for the U.S. to take half of Ukraine’s rare-earth mineral resources in return for continued U.S. support.
Waltz called the deal “protection in and of itself. I can’t think of any better security guarantee than being co-invested with President Trump.”
“The American people deserve to be recouped, deserve to have some kind of payback for the billions they have invested in this war,” he said. “I think that Zelenskyy would be very wise to enter into this agreement with the United States.”
Asked about the cost of the three-year war to Ukrainians, Waltz said, “Look, the Ukrainian people have fought valiantly, they have seen entire cities destroyed, the United States and Europe have supported this effort, but the United States has unquestionably borne the brunt of that support.”
Waltz will be one of several top Trump aides who’ll meet this week in Saudi Arabia with Russian officials to prepare for peace talks. Zelenskyy says neither he nor any top aides have been invited.
Zelenskyy, backed by European leaders, has said he won’t accept any U.S.-Russian deal worked out without Ukrainian participation.
“So I will never accept any decisions between the United States and Russia about Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said in a pre-recorded interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” broadcast Sunday. “Never. And our people, never.”
Waltz’s remarks follow a rocky debut for the Trump administration at security meetings in Europe, where Vice President JD Vance angered European officials with a call to engage with far-right parties, and where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s remarks about Ukraine and other military matters drew rebukes even from conservative Republican senators.
