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President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met at the White House on Tuesday, discussing plans for Ukraine to begin producing its own Patriot missile interceptors and efforts to revive stalled peace talks with Russia, in a meeting both leaders described as productive.
Trump characterized the sit-down warmly in a social media post following the meeting, saying it was “a great honor” to meet with Zelenskyy and that “many things were discussed” during what he described as a meeting that “went very well.” The two leaders met privately in the Oval Office before attending a Washington memorial service later Tuesday afternoon honoring Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who died July 11 at age 71 shortly after returning from a trip to Kyiv.
Zelenskyy, writing on social media after the meeting, thanked Trump for what he called a “good meeting” and for the administration’s continued support of Ukraine in its war against Russia, now in its fifth year. “The President and I discussed licenses for Patriot interceptor production and several other ideas that could help,” Zelenskyy wrote, referring to the advanced U.S.-made surface-to-air missile systems that have become central to Ukraine’s air defense against Russian strikes.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described both the Zelenskyy meeting and a separate sit-down Trump held later Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “positive and productive.”
Tuesday’s meeting marked the second time this month that Trump and Zelenskyy have met in person, and it came against a backdrop of significantly warmer relations between the two leaders than existed roughly a year and a half ago, when a televised Oval Office meeting between them collapsed into a heated exchange that led Zelenskyy to leave the White House early and forced the cancellation of a planned joint press conference. Trump wrote at the time that Zelenskyy had “disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office,” adding that he could return “when he is ready for Peace.”
The relationship has since improved considerably. Zelenskyy noted in a recent interview that an April 2025 meeting between the two leaders at the Vatican, held on the sidelines of Pope Francis’s funeral, marked what he called a turning point in his discussions with Trump.
Tuesday’s talks also touched on efforts to jump-start direct negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. Zelenskyy told U.S. senators after meeting with Trump that stepping up the diplomatic process remained a priority. Two people familiar with the discussions said U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, have agreed to travel to Ukraine for the first time as part of an effort to restart mediation between Kyiv and Moscow. Witkoff and Kushner have made multiple trips to Russia and held several meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin since Trump returned to office in January 2025, but neither has previously visited Ukraine in that capacity. No specific date has been set for the planned trip, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.
The Ukraine-Russia war has increasingly intersected with the separate, escalating conflict between the United States and Iran in recent weeks. Zelenskyy has said Russia provided Iran with satellite imagery of U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf, an allegation Trump said he intends to raise directly with Putin. Ukraine, for its part, fired on at least one Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea over the weekend, according to reports of the exchange between Trump and Zelenskyy. Hamidreza Azizi, a visiting fellow specializing in Iranian security at the Berlin-based think tank SWP, said Iran could respond at the political level to Ukraine’s strike by formally recognizing Crimea and the Donbas region as Russian territory, something Tehran has so far declined to do.
During his one-day visit to Washington, Zelenskyy also held talks with Finnish President Alexander Stubb at a Washington hotel and met separately with U.S. senators at the Capitol. He said he met with officials from Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor and a manufacturer of the Patriot missile system, to discuss further cooperation on defense production and technology sharing. “Ukraine has a lot to share with those who help us protect lives,” Zelenskyy wrote of that meeting.
Luke Coffey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said expanding Patriot interceptor production capacity is important not just for Ukraine but for the United States and its Gulf allies as well, particularly given that supplies of the interceptors have been strained by the ongoing conflict with Iran.
Zelenskyy also offered condolences to Trump over Graham’s death during their meeting. Graham, one of the most vocal congressional supporters of Ukraine’s war effort, made his final official trip to Kyiv shortly before his death and helped secure an agreement on a sanctions package aimed at punishing countries that continue to purchase Russian oil, gas and other exports.
Trump and Zelenskyy’s warming relationship follows what U.S. officials have described as a broader shift among Trump allies toward more consistent support for Ukraine, including a widely publicized change of position on the war by a prominent far-right commentator close to the president. That shift has coincided with renewed momentum on both the military and diplomatic tracks of the conflict, even as the war shows no sign of concluding on its own in the near term.
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