Trump and Zelenskyy meet at the Vatican before Pope Francis's funeral

On 26 April 2025 President Donald J. Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met for approximately 15 minutes, seated face-to-face on two chairs in a side hall of St. Peter’s Basilica, before the funeral Mass for Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Square.¹ A photograph released by the Office of the President of Ukraine showed the two principals alone, without aides. A brief secondary encounter the same day involved French President Emmanuel Macron and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. White House communications director Steven Cheung described the meeting as “very productive”; Zelenskyy called it “a good meeting” with “potential to become historic.”¹ It was the first in-person meeting between the two presidents since the 28 February 2025 Oval Office meeting, which had ended early with the planned joint press conference cancelled and the United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund framework left unsigned.² The Vatican meeting followed Special Envoy Steve Witkoff’s 25 April 2025 meeting in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Lt. Gen. (ret.) Keith Kellogg’s earlier-in-the-week meetings in London with Ukrainian and European officials.³⁴

1. Later on 26 April Trump posted on Truth Social that Putin may need to be “handled differently, through ‘Banking’ or ‘Secondary Sanctions,’” and questioned whether Putin “is tapping me along” rather than seeking to end the war.⁵

2. Executive Order 14024 of 15 April 2021 (“Blocking Property With Respect to Specified Harmful Foreign Activities of the Government of the Russian Federation”), 86 Fed. Reg. 20249, is the principal IEEPA framework under which OFAC sanctions on Russian financial institutions and other targets are administered; § 228 and § 231 of the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, Pub. L. 115-44, authorise secondary sanctions on third-country persons engaging in significant transactions with sanctioned Russian entities.⁶⁷

3. The bilateral was the first direct presidential contact since 28 February 2025. Working-level US-Ukraine talks on the Reconstruction Investment Fund framework remained pending at the dateline.