Trump: 'Better' if Putin, Zelensky meet without him

President Trump said Tuesday that it would be “better” if Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met without him first as Trump pushes the leaders to bring an end to the more than three-year-long war in Eastern Europe.

The president, who has pushed for a three-way summit with Zelensky and Putin, said he recently had “very successful” meetings with both leaders, but it would be more beneficial if the two presidents met alone first. 

"I thought it would be better if they met without me, just to see. I want to see what goes on. You know, they had a hard relationship, very bad, very bad relationship,” Trump said in an interview on "The Mark Levin Show."

"And now we’ll see how they do and, if necessary, and it probably would be, but if necessary, I’ll go and I’ll probably be able to get it close," he told conservative podcaster Mark Levin.

After meeting with Zelensky and seven European leaders at the White House on Monday, Trump said his administration would help broker a meeting between Putin and Zelensky and that soon after, a trilateral meeting including the U.S. president would take place. 

Zelensky has expressed openness to meeting with Putin, but Russia so far has not committed to such a huddle. 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday that any such meeting should be prepared “step by step, gradually, starting from the expert level and then going through all the necessary stages.”

After Monday's Oval Office meeting, Trump called Putin and the two spoke for about 40 minutes. The conversation came days after the president traveled to Alaska to meet with Putin, their first face-to-face interaction since the first Trump administration, alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff. 

"I just want to see what happens at the meeting,” Trump told Levin. “So they’re in the process of setting it up, and we’re going to see what happens.”