This handout photograph taken and released by Ukrainian Presidential press-service on May 18, 2025 shows President Volodymyr Zelensky and Vice President of the United States JD Vance talking during their meeting in Rome. (Photo by Handout / Ukrainian Presidential press-service/ AFP)
Vice President JD Vance met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Rome on Sunday as the Trump administration continued to push for a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine.
The meeting at the US ambassador’s residence - which was also attended by Secretary of State Marco Rubio - came as the world leaders attended the inaugural Mass of Pope Leo XIV. Vance’s office released few details, but Zelensky described the session in a post on Telegram as a "good meeting.”
"Pressure on Russia must continue until it is ready to stop the war,” Zelensky said in the post, adding that he "reaffirmed Ukraine’s readiness for real diplomacy and stressed the importance of a full and unconditional ceasefire as soon as possible.”
The meeting comes amid heightened Ukrainian anxieties about a phone call scheduled for Monday morning between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump has made clear that he will discuss terms for ending the war in Ukraine with Putin, but Kyiv and Moscow remain far apart on what would constitute a fair deal.
Meanwhile Sunday, Russia launched its largest drone attack since the start of the war, Ukraine’s military said, destroying homes, killing one woman and injuring three others, including a 4-year-old child.
Zelensky and his top aides want to make sure that talks between Putin and Trump won’t deliver a fait accompli that Ukraine can’t accept, said one U.S. diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic conversations.
On Friday, Ukrainian and Russian officials met in Istanbul for their first face-to-face meeting in years. But the meeting lasted just two hours, and Russia’s maximalist demands infuriated Ukraine. In particular, the Russian delegation, led by Vladimir Medinsky, insisted that Ukraine withdraw from its own territory - which Russia only partly controls - a nonstarter for Kyiv. Just one concrete agreement emerged: a deal to swap roughly 1,000 prisoners.
Some Western observers had hoped the talks could actually bring progress toward ending the war. But Putin deflated those hopes by sending a relatively low-level delegation, making clear that an immediate peace deal was unlikely. Trump had suggested he might join the talks but ultimately did not do so.
Still, Rubio described the Istanbul meeting as "not a complete waste of time” in an interview that aired Sunday on CBS News’s "Face the Nation.” Rubio said he spoke with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, on Saturday to gauge his impression of the talks and said the Russians would soon be preparing a document laying out their specific conditions for any ceasefire agreement. Ukraine will probably be doing the same, Rubio said.
"If those papers have ideas on them that are realistic and rational, then I think we know we’ve made progress,” Rubio said. "If those papers, on the other hand, have requirements in them that we know are unrealistic, then we’ll have a different assessment. So, we’re going to try to find that out.”
Earlier Sunday, Zelensky shook hands with Vance as he arrived for the pope’s inaugural celebrations at the Vatican, which Rubio also attended. It was the first face-to-face encounter between the US vice president and Zelensky since February, when a meeting between the pair and Trump devolved into a heated clash before reporters assembled in the Oval Office.
Trump announced plans for separate Monday phone calls with Putin and Zelensky in a Saturday post on Truth Social. "HOPEFULLY IT WILL BE A PRODUCTIVE DAY, A CEASEFIRE WILL TAKE PLACE, AND THIS VERY VIOLENT WAR, A WAR THAT SHOULD HAVE NEVER HAPPENED, WILL END,” Trump wrote.
Speaking Sunday on ABC News’s "This Week,” Trump’s top negotiator on the ceasefire talks, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, said the calls would "go a long way toward identifying where we are and how we complete this negotiation.”
"The president is determined to get something done here,” said Witkoff, who predicted the calls would be "successful.” "If he can’t do it, then nobody can.”
Rubio, too, expressed confidence in Trump’s ability to negotiate a deal, suggesting that an in-person meeting between the president and Putin might be necessary.
"One of the things that could break this logjam - perhaps the only thing - is a direct conversation between President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin,” Rubio said. "He has openly expressed a desire, and a belief that needs to happen.”
Bridget Brink, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, said on CBS’s "Face the Nation” that she would counsel Trump not to "give a single meeting or concession or legitimacy until Putin agrees to an unconditional ceasefire.”
Brink, a career diplomat who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, resigned her post in April as tensions over the Trump administration’s approach to the conflict began to spill into open view. She explained her decision for the first time Friday in an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press, saying she felt the Trump administration’s policy was to "put pressure on the victim, Ukraine, rather than on the aggressor, Russia.”
Speaking Sunday, she said the hostile treatment of Zelensky in the Oval Office was the first red flag. In that meeting, Vance berated the Ukrainian president and accused him of being "disrespectful,” while Trump told Zelensky he should be more "thankful” for US efforts on Ukraine’s behalf.
"I fully agree that the war needs to end,” Brink said Sunday. "But I believe that peace at any price is not peace at all. It’s appeasement.”
