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Trump, Putin Signal Arms Control Interest
September 2025
By Xiaodon Liang
President Donald Trump signaled that the United States is preparing to resume discussions on nuclear arms control with Russia and said that the topic was raised during an Aug. 15 summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“We have restrictions [on nuclear weapons] and they have restrictions. That’s not an agreement you want expiring,” Trump said July 25 in response to questions from the Russian newswire TASS regarding the February 2026 expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
“We are starting to work on that,” he said.
En route to Anchorage, Alaska, for the summit, Trump told Fox News that, “we have nuclear treaties to discuss. We have a lot of things to discuss that normally would be something that would come naturally. But it’s not so natural now because of Ukraine.”
He elaborated slightly Aug. 25, telling reporters at the White House that he wants a nuclear deal that includes China as well as Russia and “talked about that also” with Putin in Alaska. But such negotiations can be put off until the Russian war on Ukraine is “over with,” Trump said according to Reuters.
Speaking at the Kremlin Aug. 14, Putin likewise said Russia aimed “to establish long-term conditions for peace not only between [the United States and Russia] but also in Europe and indeed globally—especially if we proceed to subsequent stages involving agreements on strategic offensive arms control.”
Trump had invited Putin to Alaska for a bilateral meeting to advance negotiations on a ceasefire in Ukraine. The summit ended without an agreement, but the sides indicated a willingness to continue talks based on tentative understandings reached during a meeting between the heads of state and two senior advisors on each side. A scheduled lunch between larger delegations was canceled.
The meeting was dominated by continuing disagreements over how to end the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Although Putin said at a joint press conference following the talks that the two presidents had reached an “understanding” and that the dialogue had yielded “emerging progress,” Trump was quick to deny that any agreement was close.
According to reporting by The New York Times, citing unnamed European security officials, Putin had pressed Trump to advocate for a peace deal whereby Ukraine would acknowledge the cession of two regions to Russia—Donetsk and Luhansk—and withdraw from territories within those regions it still controlled.
Putin was successful in at least convincing Trump to drop an approach, previously agreed with European allies days before the summit, to negotiate for a ceasefire first before seeking a full peace agreement. In an Aug. 16 social media post, Trump indicated that he would prefer, “to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do[es] not hold up.”
But Trump did indicate for the first time, in an Aug. 16 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the U.S. willingness to provide Ukraine with security guarantees as part of a postwar settlement.
Zelenskyy and a group of European allies discussed the exact form of those guarantees, as well as the peace negotiations in general, with Trump during an Aug. 18 meeting in Washington. According to a press release the next day from the office of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, European military officials will meet with U.S. counterparts to formulate a plan to “deliver robust security guarantees and prepare for the deployment of a reassurance force” after the war ends. Ukraine will also purchase $90 billion in U.S. arms as part of efforts to provide for its own security, Zelenskyy said at a briefing in Washington.
Although Trump was quick to rule out the deployment of U.S. troops in Ukraine in an Aug. 19 interview with Fox News, he suggested instead that the United States might provide air support as part of its guarantees.
But even as supporters of Ukraine come closer to defining a viable security guarantee, Russia has reiterated its opposition to any external military presence in Ukraine. In an Aug. 18 statement, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova said Russia “unequivocally reject[s] any scenarios involving the deployment of NATO military contingents in Ukraine.”