Zelensky will meet Trump in D.C. on Monday

After inconclusive U.S.-Russia summit, Ukrainian leader will visit White House.

- By Samya KuLLas, JoHN LEICESTER, EMMA BURROWS AND ELISE MorTON

ALISHIA ABODUNDE Getty Images PRESIDENT Zelensky, shown in London last week, said he had a "long and substantive" talk with Trump.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will meet Monday in Washington with President Trump, who has shifted to saying that an overall peace agreement — and not a ceasefire — is the next step in ending the 3½-year-old war.

Trump’s abrupt reversal, aligning himself with a position held by Russian President Vladimir Putin, came in a social media post Saturday, hours after they concluded a summit in Alaska that produced no agreement to halt the fighting. Putin has long said that Moscow is not interested in a temporary truce and instead is seeking a long-term settlement that takes the Kremlin’s interests into account.

After calls with Zelensky and European leaders, Trump posted that “it was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not holdup.”

In a statement after the Trump call, the European leaders did not address whether a peace deal was preferable to a ceasefire, saying that they “welcomed President Trump's efforts to stop the killing in Ukraine, end Russia’s war of aggression, and achieve just and lasting peace.”

Trump and Ukraine’s European allies had been calling for a ceasefire ahead of any negotiations.

Trump’s statement that a peace agreement should be reached before a ceasefire appears to indicate the U.S. president’s thinking is “shifting towards Putin,” an approach that would allow Moscow to keep fighting while negotiating, said Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London.