President Donald Trump shakes hands with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Aug. 18, 2025, in Washington.

Donald Trump made a big song and dance out of his long-awaited face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Putin last week, although it was widely written off as a failure.

The US president was unable to get any firm guarantees from his Russian counterpart that he would end the Ukraine war, and instead ended up dropping his own call for a ceasefire in a major concession to Moscow.

The president then had another chance to show his support for Kyiv on Monday, when he invited Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and seven European leaders – including prime minister Keir Starmer – to the White House to dissect the Putin summit.

Trump did promise more security guarantees for Ukraine but did not explain exactly what that might look like.

And while all of the Ukraine’s allies – and Putin – played to Trump’s ego in thanking him profusely for trying to bring the war to a close, few concrete promises actually emerged from the talks.

So what might happen next? Here’s a look at some of the options.

Are there more meetings on the horizon?

Trump has promised to arrange a bilateral meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy in the coming weeks.

Moscow has yet to publicly agree, but – if it went ahead – it would mark the first time the two leaders have met face to face since 2019.

That informal encounter was set up by European diplomats in a bid to end the fighting in Ukraine’s Donbas region, but failed to set up any long-term change as the two countries are still fighting over the land.

Trump tried to set up a subsequent meeting in Turkey in May this year,

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