WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he will probably meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during a NATO summit this week, opening a door for Kyiv to press its case for buying U.S. Patriot missile systems and tougher sanctions to fight Russia.
Trump made the comments to reporters on board Air Force One on Tuesday. Earlier in the day, a White House official said Trump was scheduled to meet Zelenskiy at some point during the NATO summit, taking place on Tuesday and Wednesday in The Hague.
Trump pulled out from a hoped-for meeting with Zelenskiy last week, when the U.S. president left the G7 meeting in Canada early, saying he needed to focus on the crisis in the Middle East.
In comments released by his office on Saturday, Zelenskiy outlined his three priorities if a meeting with Trump were to take place at the NATO summit.
Firstly, he said he wanted to discuss weapons, saying that during the G7 summit, his aides had given U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent a wish-list of arms, including Patriot missile defence systems, which he described as worth “a very large amount”.
Zelenskiy said Ukraine was “ready to find the money for this whole package” rather than requesting it as military aid.
Secondly, he wanted to talk about sanctions on Russia, and thirdly about other diplomatic ways of applying greater pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
(Reporting by Nandita Bose, Katharine Jackson in Washington and Dan Peleschuk in Kyiv; Writing by Doina Chiacu and Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Brendan O’Brien and Alistair Bell)
