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Trump Participates in a Bilateral Meeting with the President of Ukraine, Aug. 18, 2025

August 18, 2025 · The White House · 0:29:36

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

President Donald Trump met President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine in the Oval Office on August 18, 2025, three days after the Anchorage summit with President Putin, carried in full on the White House channel. “We’ve had a lot of good discussions and a lot of good talks, and I think progress is being made — very, very substantial progress in many ways,” the President said. President Zelenskyy thanked him “for your efforts, personal efforts, to stop killings and stop this war,” and presented the First Lady’s letter on abducted Ukrainian children, delivered through his wife, Ukraine’s First Lady.

Taking questions, the President set out the path as he saw it: “I think if everything works out well today, we’ll have a trilat. And I think there will be a reasonable chance of ending the war when we do that.” Asked whether the day was deal-or-no-deal for American support, he answered: “I can never say that. It’s never the end of the road. People are being killed, and we want to stop that.” On peacekeeping, he said the United States would work with Ukraine and with everybody to make sure that “if there’s peace, the peace is going to stay long term.” President Zelenskyy said Ukraine is ready for the trilateral format.

Why it matters

The August 18 bilateral is the hinge between Anchorage and the European leaders’ session that followed it the same afternoon: the Ukrainian president at the White House, the trilateral proposal on the table, and American support explicitly not conditioned on the day’s outcome — the commitments the multilateral meeting then took up.

Scoreboard watch

This meeting is a scoreboard reference point: the trilateral-meeting path described by the President on August 18, 2025, and his statement that U.S. support was not at an end of the road, as stated by the President, to be checked against the meetings that followed.

Sources: The White House, “President Trump Participates in a Bilateral Meeting with the President of Ukraine” (official upload, embedded above). All characterizations as stated by the Presidents at the meeting. Alternate ID recorded: ndXoAsR3xEQ (White House 0:55 greeting clip of the same visit).