Will Zelenskyy and Putin speak?

A direct Zelenskyy-Putin meeting remains a high-bar event because both leaders have strong political incentives to avoid appearing to concede legitimacy or battlefield leverage. The war has also entrenched deep mistrust, and even when negotiations intensify, they usually proceed through intermediaries rather than a leader-to-leader encounter. That makes the baseline outcome still No, especially with only a few months left before the deadline and no visible evidence here of a breakthrough already underway.

Even so, the market’s 13% looks somewhat too low relative to how quickly diplomatic conditions can change in this conflict. If the war reaches a ceasefire or a near-ceasefire framework, a direct call or tightly managed meeting becomes plausible as a ratification step or symbolic summit, particularly if external actors such as the US, Turkey, or Gulf states pressure both sides. These kinds of events often have low steady-state probability but fat-tailed upside once negotiations begin, which argues for a higher number than a simple extrapolation from the status quo.

The key question is not whether the two leaders want to meet today, but whether enough pressure accumulates to make a carefully scripted contact the least bad option. Because the deadline is still within a politically relevant horizon and because even a brief conversation would satisfy the market definition, I see a real path to Yes that is larger than one-in-eight. Still, absent a visible diplomatic opening, the most likely outcome remains that they do not speak by the cutoff, so the position should remain skewed toward No overall.