WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said he will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin next Friday in Alaska to discuss ending the war in Ukraine, a potential breakthrough after weeks of expressing frustration that more was not being done to quell the fighting.

The Kremlin has not yet confirmed the details, which Trump announced on social media, but both nations had said they expected a meeting could happen as soon as next week.

Such a summit may prove pivotal in a war that began more than three years ago when Russia invaded its western neighbor and has led to tens of thousands of deaths — although there’s no guarantee it will stop the fighting since Moscow and Kyiv remain far apart on their conditions for peace.

In comments to reporters at the White House before his post confirming the date and place, Trump suggested that any agreement would likely involve “some swapping of territories,” but he gave no details. Analysts, including some close to the Kremlin, have suggested that Russia could offer to give up territory it controls outside of the four regions it claims to have annexed.

Trump said his meeting with Putin would come before any sit-down discussion involving Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump also previously agreed to meet with Putin even if the Russian leader would not meet with Zelenskyy. That stoked fears in Europe that Ukraine could be sidelined in efforts to stop the continent’s biggest conflict since World War II.

Trump’s announcement that he planned to host one of America’s adversaries on U.S. soil broke with expectations that they’d meet in a third country. The gesture gives Putin validation after the U.S. and its allies had long sought to make him a pariah over his war against Ukraine.

Early in Putin’s tenure, he regularly met with his U.S. counterparts. That dropped off and the tone became icier as tensions mounted between Russia and the West after Moscow illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and faced allegations of meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections.

Putin’s last visit to the U.S. was in 2015, when he attended the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York. The meeting in Alaska would be the first U.S.-Russia summit since 2021, when former President Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva.

After announcing Friday a framework aimed at ending decades of conflict elsewhere in the world — between Armenia and Azerbaijan — Trump said he would meet with Putin “very shortly.” His subsequent post said “the highly anticipated meeting” would happen Aug. 15 in Alaska and more details would follow.

Trump had told reporters that the summit would have been sooner, “but I guess there’s security arrangements that unfortunately people have to make.”

Trump said, “President Putin, I believe, wants to see peace, and Zelenskyy wants to see peace.” He said that, “In all fairness to President Zelenskyy, he’s getting everything he needs to, assuming we get something done.”

Trump said a peace deal would likely mean Ukraine and Russia would swap some territory they each control.

“Nothing easy,” the president said. “But we’re gonna get some back. We’re gonna get some switched. There’ll be some swapping of territories, to the betterment of both.”

Pressed on if this was the last chance to make a major peace deal, Trump said, “I don’t like using the term last chance,” and said that, “When those guns start going off, it’s awfully tough to get ’em to stop.”

Exasperated that Putin did not heed his calls to stop bombing Ukrainian cities, Trump almost two weeks ago moved up his ultimatum to impose additional sanctions on Russia and introduce secondary tariffs targeting countries that buy Russian oil if the Kremlin did not move toward a settlement.

The deadline was Friday. But the White House did not answer questions that evening about the state of possible sanctions after Trump’s announcement of an upcoming meeting with Putin.

Prior to Trump announcing the meeting with Putin, his efforts to pressure Russia into stopping the fighting had delivered no progress. The Kremlin’s bigger army is slowly advancing deeper into Ukraine at great cost in troops and armor while it relentlessly bombards Ukrainian cities. Russia and Ukraine are far apart on their terms for peace.