KYIV (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald 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, after meeting his Ukrainian counterpart on Wednesday.
Both leaders said the 50-minute meeting on the sidelines of a NATO summit in The Hague was a positive step in a war now in its fourth year, and which Trump described as “more difficult than other wars”.
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 U.S. 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.
Trump had previously shown no signs of resuming the donations of weaponry to Ukraine against Russia’s invasion that his predecessor Joe Biden had instituted.
Zelenskiy described the meeting as “long and substantive”, saying it covered “all the truly important issues”.
“We discussed how to achieve a ceasefire and a real peace,” he wrote on X. “We spoke about how to protect our people.”
Trump added that he would speak to Vladimir Putin again soon, saying the Russian president “really has to end that war”.
Zelenskiy has worked to rebuild relations with Washington after a disastrous White House meeting in February with Trump, whose overtures to Russia in recent months have concerned officials in Kyiv.
(Reporting by Yuliia Dysa; writing by Dan Peleschuk; editing by Alison Williams, Alexandra Hudson and Mark Heinrich)
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