Bloomberg: Trump Asked Zelenskyy to Go to Moscow for Putin Meeting, but Ukraine’s Leader Refused
Bloomberg reports that Donald Trump suggested Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy travel to Moscow for talks with Vladimir Putin during their meeting at the UN General Assembly, but Zelenskyy rejected the idea. The account, based on unnamed sources, underlines the gap between Trump’s personal diplomatic style and Kyiv’s sense of wartime political risk.
According to Bloomberg, Donald Trump urged Volodymyr Zelenskyy to travel to Moscow to meet Vladimir Putin, a proposal the Ukrainian president declined.
Bloomberg’s reporting says the suggestion was made during a meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. People familiar with Zelenskyy’s position told the outlet that he rejected the idea of going to the Russian capital while his country is under attack.
A Ukrainian‑language summary of the same Bloomberg story said Trump asked Zelenskyy to meet Putin in Moscow for peace talks, that Zelenskyy refused, and that the very raising of the issue by Trump irritated the Ukrainian leader. The reports describe Zelenskyy as upset by the notion of such a trip.
Zelenskyy’s office has not publicly laid out its version of the exchange, and the claims rest on unnamed sources. Even so, the story is already feeding into a larger argument about how outside powers might try to shape any eventual negotiations over the war.
The reported proposal would have carried heavy symbolism: a wartime president entering the capital of the state invading his own country, at the request of a foreign leader. For Kyiv, that would risk appearing to grant Moscow a propaganda victory and could undermine its insistence that talks must reflect Ukraine’s own conditions and security concerns.
For Trump, the account fits with a familiar pattern of highly personalized diplomacy and headline‑grabbing summit ideas. For Ukraine, it illustrates the tension between pressure for dramatic gestures and its determination to control how, when and where it engages with Russia.
Key signals to watch now are whether anyone in Kyiv or in Trump’s camp chooses to confirm, deny or elaborate on the Bloomberg account, and whether Moscow tries to use the report to argue that even Ukraine’s main ally once saw merit in direct talks on Russian soil.
Sources
- OSINT