Zelenskyy says he spoke with Trump and they agreed to meet in New York ahead of U.N. General Assembly

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday that he had spoken with President Donald Trump and that the two agreed to meet in New York, a notable sign of movement in U.S.-Ukraine diplomacy ahead of the U.N. General Assembly. Zelenskyy made the announcement on his official Telegram channel. As of the latest publicly available information, the White House had not issued a matching public readout confirming the call or a finalized bilateral meeting.

In the same post, Zelenskyy said the conversation covered diplomacy, de-escalation proposals and security issues, including energy, food and the protection of civilians. He described the exchange as important and suggested a New York meeting could be consequential, but his Telegram statement remains the primary public source for both the reported call and the meeting plan.

Zelenskyy also thanked Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner for their recent visit to Kyiv. Witkoff is a Trump envoy, and Kushner is Trump’s son-in-law and former senior adviser. In the same message, Zelenskyy thanked Trump for signing H.R. 5334, the “Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026.” The White House said Trump signed that bill into law on Sept. 18.

The outreach comes amid a renewed diplomatic push around Russia’s war in Ukraine. Multiple outlets previously reported that Witkoff and Kushner met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Sept. 5, then traveled to Kyiv, where they met Zelenskyy on Sept. 6. That back-to-back travel put two figures close to Trump at the center of an unusually direct round of shuttle diplomacy between Moscow and Kyiv.

A possible Zelenskyy-Trump meeting in New York had already been under discussion. Ukrainian officials and Ukrainian media had reported that U.S. and Ukrainian teams were working to organize talks on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly high-level week, when world leaders gather and bilateral meetings are often arranged quickly. Dates from Sept. 21 to Sept. 23 had been discussed publicly.

Still, the U.S. side had not publicly confirmed such a meeting as of the latest reporting cited in the research. As of Sept. 19, Trump’s publicly posted U.N. bilateral schedule did not list Zelenskyy. That leaves Zelenskyy’s Telegram post as verified evidence of what the Ukrainian president said publicly, but not independent U.S. confirmation that the call took place or that a New York meeting has been finalized.