Trump Officials Hint at Possible Concessions by Putin

President Trump and two advisers spent Sunday trying to recast the lack of a cease-fire in the war in Ukraine as one step in a possibly slow march toward peace. It was a significant departure from the peace agreement that the president said he had wanted out of a meeting in Alaska with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia just 48 hours earlier.

Steve Witkoff, an envoy for Mr. Trump who had attended the meeting in Anchorage, said in a CNN interview on Sunday that Mr. Putin had edged toward making some concessions in talks to end the war, including by agreeing to strong security protections, though not under NATO, that Mr. Trump had floated earlier.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is scheduled to meet with Mr. Trump on Monday, and is expected to be flanked by at least half a dozen European leaders.

In a tandem appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was also at Mr. Trump’s side in Anchorage, took a more cautious approach. He warned that both Russia and Ukraine would need to make concessions to end the war and that a peace agreement might be elusive in the short term.

“We made progress in the sense that we identified potential areas of agreement, but there remain some big areas of disagreement,” Mr. Rubio said. “So we’re still a long ways off. We are not at the precipice of a peace agreement. We are not at the edge of one. But I do think progress was made.”

The television appearances by Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Rubio, who were the only people at Mr. Trump’s side as he met with Mr. Putin on Friday, illustrated just how hard the Trump administration has worked to reframe expectations on a compressed timeline. On Friday, the president said that he was “not going to be happy” and that there would be “severe consequences” if the Russians did not agree to stop the war. By Sunday, all three were hailing progress without offering many specifics.

Mr. Witkoff said that, before the meeting, the Ukrainians had stressed that no land trades could be agreed upon by Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin, and that Mr. Trump had abided by their request. But Mr. Witkoff bypassed a question by his host, Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union,” asking whether the Russians had demanded an entire eastern region of Ukraine, the Donbas, in exchange for peace.

Mr. Witkoff said that five regions of Ukraine were discussed in the meeting, and that the Russians had offered concessions. (Mr. Putin has expressed an interest in taking swaths of the country that are not currently under occupation, including parts of the eastern region of Donbas, a proposal that Kyiv has rejected.)

“I don’t know that we have the time now to go through all the different issues on these five regions,” Mr. Witkoff said. “The Russians made some concessions at the table with regard to all five of those regions. There is an important discussion to be had with regard to Donetsk and what would happen there, and that discussion is going to specifically be detailed on Monday.”

Russia now occupies almost 20 percent of Ukraine, including about three-quarters of Donetsk, almost all of the adjacent Luhansk region and the entire Crimean Peninsula.

As Mr. Zelensky prepares for his White House audience with Mr. Trump, he is no doubt intent on avoiding the sort of railroading that happened in the Oval Office in February, when Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance insulted the Ukrainian leader for demanding help. He will attend with Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy will also join, as will NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, and the president of the European Union’s executive arm, Ursula von der Leyen.

Mr. Trump has offered Mr. Zelensky vague security guarantees modeled on Article 5 of the NATO pact, which stipulates that an attack on one ally would be defended as an attack on all. Mr. Witkoff said on CNN that Mr. Putin had embraced this idea. Mr. Trump, mirroring Mr. Putin’s wishes, has said that Ukraine has no chance of joining NATO, a long-held goal of Mr. Zelensky’s as he seeks more security protection against Russian forces.

In his CNN interview, Mr. Witkoff said that no cease-fire deal had been reached, in part because Mr. Trump “pivoted” toward other areas of discussion.

Mr. Witkoff, a billionaire New York real estate developer with no formal background in international relations, has become Mr. Trump’s most relied-upon envoy when it comes to trying to solve the many conflicts around the world that Mr. Trump has tried to mediate. The president has envisioned himself as a peacemaker and is in pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize. The two men golfed together on Saturday after returning from Alaska.

“We are intent on trying to hammer out a peace deal that ends the fighting permanently, very, very quickly, quicker than a cease-fire,” Mr. Witkoff said, without describing how ongoing negotiations were more effective than a cease-fire. Fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces has continued through the weekend.

“We cut through all kinds of issues” that would need to be discussed, Mr. Witkoff said, brushing off questions about how Mr. Trump, who went to Alaska saying he would be unhappy if he left without a cease-fire agreement, had walked away from the meeting seemingly happy about how it went.

In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Rubio did not rule out the United States imposing more sanctions on Russia, but said that doing so would signal the failure of Mr. Trump’s efforts to reach a cease-fire deal or lasting peace in Ukraine.

“The minute he takes those steps, all talks stop,” Mr. Rubio said. “The minute we take those steps, there is no one left in the world to go talk to the Russians and try to get them to the table to reach a peace agreement,” he added.

As Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Rubio gave their interviews, Mr. Trump himself weighed in on social media, railing against the news media’s coverage of his meeting with Mr. Putin and likening Mr. Zelensky’s visit to another episode in a long-running television drama. “BIG PROGRESS ON RUSSIA,” he wrote. “STAY TUNED!”

Enjoli Liston and Constant Méheut contributed reporting.