Will Zelenskyy and Putin speak?

A direct meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin remains structurally difficult because both leaders have strong political and legal incentives to avoid legitimizing the other side on unfavorable terms. Putin has repeatedly preferred to deal through intermediaries unless a summit would produce a clear strategic gain, while Zelenskyy has little reason to meet without meaningful security guarantees or a negotiated framework that he can present as substantively worthwhile. The core obstacle is not just hostility but asymmetry: each side can usually extract more by talking through mediators than by taking the domestic and diplomatic risks of a face-to-face encounter.

That said, the probability is not zero because war-ending negotiations sometimes force exactly the kind of leader-level meeting that would otherwise seem implausible. If battlefield pressure, sanctions fatigue, or a major U.S. or European diplomatic push created a near-complete ceasefire package, a summit could become the final ratification step. The time window is short, but the remaining period before the deadline is also the sort of interval in which fast-moving diplomatic deals can emerge if the broader conflict environment shifts sharply.

Relative to the current market price, I think the market is pricing this as a near-impossibility, and that is a bit too aggressive. The most likely outcome is still no meeting, but 5.2% appears to understate the chance of an eleventh-hour negotiation format, a formalized summit in a neutral venue, or a narrowly defined encounter under heavy international pressure. The event is correctly treated as a long shot, but not so much of a long shot that a price around one in twenty fully captures the upside tail.