After his special envoy Steve Witkoff met with Russian President Vladmir Putin at the Kremlin on August 6 and discussed Moscow's war on Ukraine, US President Donald Trump said they made "great progress," but later he told reporters he did not see it as a "breakthrough."
In a phone call, he told European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy he wants to meet with Putin, possibly next week, and then hold a summit with Putin and Zelenskyy as he pushes for peace.
Russia sounded enthusiastic about face-to-face talks between Trump and Putin but far cooler about the idea of a trilateral summit. Meanwhile, the fate of sanctions Trump threatened to impose in the absence of a deal to end the war is uncertain.
In the wake of the Putin-Witkoff meeting, here are three key questions -- and potential answers.
Did Putin Get A Win?
Hours after the meeting on Moscow, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Trump would decide in 24-36 hours whether to go ahead with new sanctions on Russia and the countries that buy its oil -- in other words, by the August 8 deadline Trump had set for Russia to stop the war.
Either way, though, Putin has gotten one thing he always wants: a seat at the table with the United States, first in the form of his meeting with Witkoff and later, if it materializes, his first meeting with a US president in over four years and the first with Trump since the latter took office for this second term in January.
Both Trump and Yury Ushakov, Putin's top foreign policy aide, have said the two presidents could meet as early as next week.
Putin seems likely to benefit the most from a bilateral meeting, which at least for now would leave Zelenskyy and Kyiv's European backers out in the cold.
"Trump and Putin were locked in a dead-end ever since Trump announced his deadline," Sam Greene, an analyst, author, and professor of Russian politics, wrote on the social networking site Bluesky on August 6.
"These proposed talks -- if, of course, they happen -- are a way out," Greene wrote. "Enough progress for Trump to claim his threats worked, but not enough for Putin to look like he's caving. But it's a better move for Russia than for anyone else."
Putin said on August 7 that he would like to meet with Trump next week.
Several US media outlets cited White House officials as saying on condition of anonymity that a bilateral meeting would not take place unless Putin also meets with Zelenskyy.
But Trump later said that wasn't the case. He told reporters at the White House that Putin does not have to agree to meet with Zelenskyy in order to have a meeting with him.
Will A Trilateral Summit Take Place?
Russia has consistently given the idea of a meeting with Zelenskyy the cold shoulder, suggesting it should only happen once the sides are close to signing a peace deal, not just a cease-fire agreement.
That moment seems far off given the huge gap between the Russian and Ukrainian positions that persists on several major issues, including territory and security, despite three rounds of direct talks in Turkey since mid-May. Putin rejected Zelenskyy's offer to meet face-to-face when the two sides held the first round of negotiations in Istanbul.
While Zelenskyy talked up the idea of a trilateral meeting with Trump in comments on August 7, Ushakov talked it down.
"We propose, first of all, to focus on preparing a bilateral meeting with Trump, and we consider it most important that this meeting be successful and productive," he said.
Later the same day, Putin said he has nothing against meeting with Zelenskyy but that "certain conditions must be created" first and that for now those conditions are "far away," the Interfax news agency reported.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in comments to Fox Business Network on August 6, suggested it could be some time before there are grounds for a trilateral summit between Trump, Zelenskyy, and Putin.
"If we can get what the Ukrainians will accept and what the Russians will accept close enough, then I think there's the opportunity for the president to have a meeting that includes both Putin and Zelenskyy to try to close this thing out," he said. "So we've got to get closer in that regard."
In the meantime, for Putin, a meeting with Trump could be a chance to press the United States to get on board with some of Russia's stated conditions for a cease-fire or peace deal and to try to get Washington to pressure Kyiv into accepting them before any trilateral talks are held.
In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly criticized Putin, saying the United States gets "a lot of bullshit" from him and calling him out for saying he wants peace and then killing civilians in relentless air attacks on Ukraine.
So Trump might not be swayed by Moscow's efforts to lay the bulk of the blame on Kyiv for the lack of progress toward peace -- but Putin may believe he has little to lose from meeting with the US president anyway.
Is Russia Ready To Make Concessions?
Trump did not explain what constituted the "great progress" he said was achieved at Witkoff's meeting with Putin. Rubio suggested the main result was that the United States now has "a better understanding of the conditions under which Russia would be prepared to end the war."
He did not offer details, either, but he said, "I think the key elements of any end to the war are going to be territorial," and added that if there is to be peace, "there's going to have to be concessions by the Russians and concessions by the Ukrainians, of course, as well."
Russia seized control of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014 and now occupies about one-fifth of the country, including almost all of the Luhansk region and substantial parts of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson regions, the entirety of which Moscow now baselessly claims belong to Russia.
In addition to Ukrainian neutrality and strict limits on the size of its military, one of Moscow's stated conditions for a peace deal is a Ukrainian withdrawal and international recognition of those regions as Russian -- something Kyiv says is unacceptable.
Putin and other Russian officials have repeatedly said Moscow intends to gain the four mainland regions by force if it cannot do so through negotiations, and there has been no public indication of any change in this position, though military analysts say Russian forces would be hard put to achieve this aim and could not do so anytime soon.
Ilan Berman, senior vice president at the American Foreign Policy Council and a board member of RFE/RL, said he doubts Russia is prepared to make concessions.
"It's hard to imagine that the Russian side's demands at the negotiations table will differ from the goals that Russia is trying to achieve on the battlefield," Berman told RFE/RL's Russian Service. "The Kremlin so far has not stepped back from its maximalist demands, and there are no grounds to think that Moscow is ready for compromise even on minor issues."
Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, also said Russia appears unready to alter its position or scale down its demands.
"I do not observe any substantive change in Russian tactics towards Trump or Ukraine," Stanovaya wrote on X.
"Witkoff travelled to Moscow and heard exactly what he would have heard regardless of sanctions pressure: that the war could end at any moment, provided the so-called 'root causes' are addressed," she wrote.
"However these conditions are worded, they amount to the same demand: Ukraine stops resisting, the West halts arms supplies, and Kyiv accepts Russia's terms, which effectively amount to a de facto capitulation."
