WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump will meet his Ukrainian and Syrian counterparts on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Turkey, the White House said July 5, as he seeks to make headway in addressing two key conflicts.
“On Wednesday afternoon, President Trump will participate in bilateral meetings with President Zelensky of Ukraine and President al-Sharaa of the Syrian Arab Republic,” Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in a call with reporters.
Trump’s meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in Ankara comes amid growing efforts to end the grinding, nearly stalemated invasion of Ukraine that Russia launched nearly four-and-a-half years ago.
“The president’s obviously getting together with him to talk about how we can end the war. That’s been a priority of his for a long time,” a senior US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, added about the Zelensky meeting.
Trump would “follow up” with Russian President Vladimir Putin afterwards, the official said.
Both Putin and Zelensky spoke by phone with Trump on July 4 in calls to mark the 250th anniversary of US independence.
Trump and Zelensky most recently met during the G-7 summit in France in June, where leaders agreed to intensify pressure on Russia to end the war with Ukraine.
But Trump has also had tense ties with the Ukrainian, most notably during a shouting match in the Oval Office in February 2025 when he said Zelensky lacked the “cards” to win.
The meeting with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa meanwhile comes after Trump repeatedly suggested that Damascus could get involved militarily in Lebanon, where Israel and Hezbollah are at war.
But al-Sharaa, whom Trump hosted at the White House in 2025, denied in June that his country sought to intervene militarily in Lebanon, saying he was looking for “economic channels between Lebanon and Syria, not military ones.”
Syria had dominated its neighbour for decades following its military intervention in Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war, withdrawing only in 2005, making any new military involvement a fraught proposition. AFP
