Trump and Zelensky Hold War Talks Ahead of Pope’s Funeral

US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky held crunch war talks in the heart of the Vatican minutes before the start of the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday, as the White House mounts an increasingly urgent push to strike a peace deal in Ukraine, CNN reported.

Photographs released by the Ukrainian presidency showed the two leaders huddled in close discussion without aides in the ornate surroundings of St Peter’s Basilica.

A White House spokesman accompanying Trump said that the two leaders “met privately today and had a very productive discussion.” Officials from both Zelensky’s camp and Trump’s said the meeting lasted for about 15 minutes, and the leaders agreed to continue talks, possibly later Saturday.

It was the first face-to-face encounter between Trump and Zelensky since a disastrous White House meeting in February, when the President and other US officials publicly berated Zelensky for being insufficiently grateful for US support and briefly suspended arms shipments and intelligence sharing.

How it happened?

The meeting occurred just outside the Baptistry Chapel, which is near the entrance to St Peter’s Basilica, and the talk hadn’t been telegraphed in advance.

Ahead of the president’s brief visit to Rome, officials had downplayed the prospect he would meet with Zelensky or any other world leaders, pointing to the truncated time frame for the trip and its solemn purpose of memorializing the late pope.

Trump had originally selected Saudi Arabia for his first stop abroad of his new term and will visit there next month. But when Francis died those plans changed, and instead Trump made his first foreign stop in Europe, a continent he’s railed against frequently.

The seating chart and crush of fellow leaders made brief interactions possible, including with leaders Trump had seemingly been avoiding since taking office. He engaged briefly with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, with whom he hadn’t spoken at all since returning to office amid trade and defense disputes with the European Union.

The seating protocol—arranged by country name in French—dictated Trump’s position alongside the Estonian and Finnish leaders, with whom he interacted briefly. In other cases, Trump exchanged pleasantries with other leaders who have been working on parallel efforts to help resolve the Ukraine war. He shook hands with French President Emmanuel Macron during the funeral mass’s sign of the peace.

US involvement in talks
The US has been applying more pressure on Ukraine after threatening last week it could walk away from the talks “within days” if it becomes clear a deal cannot be reached.

Trump said on Friday that Russia and Ukraine are “very close to a deal” that would end the conflict, which Russia launched in 2014 and escalated with its full-scale invasion of its neighbor in 2022.

“A good day in talks and meetings with Russia and Ukraine. They are very close to a deal, and the two sides should now meet, at very high levels, to ‘finish it off,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social after landing in Rome for the funeral of Pope Francis.