Zelenskyy hails ‘substantive’ Trump talks as US mulls sending Patriot missiles to Ukraine

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described his meeting with US President Donald Trump on Wednesday as “long and substantive,” noting that the two leaders discussed efforts to achieve a ceasefire in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Zelenskyy had hoped to use a 50-minute meeting on the sidelines of the Nato summit in The Hague to lobby Trump for investment in Ukraine’s defence effort against Russia.

“We covered all the truly important issues. I thank Mr. President, I thank the United States,” he wrote on X.

“We discussed how to achieve a ceasefire and a real peace.

“We spoke about how to protect our people.”

Shortly after the meeting, President Trump indicated he would consider supplying Ukraine with more of the Patriot air-defence missiles Kyiv relies on to defend itself from mounting Russian strikes.

Trump, during a press conference, said the weapons are “very hard to get” but that “we are going to see if we can make some of them available.”

The US leader also left open the possibility of providing more military aid to Kyiv, which has struggled to fend off grinding Russian advances on the battlefield in recent months.

Russia’s February 2022 invasion is grinding toward its three-and-a-half year mark, and Trump has shown no sign of resuming the donations of weaponry that his predecessor Joe Biden had instituted.

Earlier at the summit, Nato leaders formally committed to investing 5% of their annual GDP on defence and security-related spending by 2035, according to the final text of the Hague summit declaration adopted just now.

The text also pledges continued support for Ukraine, noting that “Ukraine’s security contributes to ours.”

While it stops short of directly condemning Russia, it includes a separate reference to “the long-term threat posed by Russia to Euro-Atlantic security.”

With inputs from agencies