Will Zelenskyy and Putin speak?

The baseline case is still no meeting: there is no confirmed date, the Kremlin has repeatedly framed any Putin-Zelenskyy encounter as something that should come only after substantive progress, and Putin has publicly downplayed the value of a bilateral summit absent a negotiated outcome. With less than six months left, the calendar itself is a major obstacle, because the sides would need to move from vague openness to concrete agreement very quickly, and the recent commentary suggests that kind of progress is not yet in hand.

That said, the probability is not negligible because both leaders continue to keep the idea alive publicly, and Zelenskyy has recently pushed for talks on a near-term timeline. The most plausible path to a meeting is not a spontaneous bilateral summit but a U.S.-brokered diplomatic breakthrough that makes a leaders’ meeting useful as a capstone, especially if ceasefire or security arrangements need political endorsement. In that sense, the key question is not whether the two men want to meet in the abstract, but whether external mediation produces enough momentum before year-end.

Compared with the current market price of 14%, I think the market is somewhat too pessimistic, though not wildly wrong. The market appears to be weighting the absence of a schedule and Moscow’s reluctance very heavily, while giving less credit to the fact that active diplomacy is ongoing and both sides have preserved optionality. Still, this remains a low-probability outcome because the most natural end state is continued indirect negotiation, not a direct bilateral encounter.