Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday that discussions over a transfer of U.S. military assets, including its coveted Tomahawk cruise missiles, have motivated Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet with President Donald Trump in Budapest, a new diplomatic rendezvous that Trump announced on Truth Social on Thursday.
Trump’s announcement of a meeting with Putin, which he said would take place in the next two weeks, comes a day before he meets Zelenskyy for the third time in Washington and as U.S. officials have touted a new mechanism by which European allies buy American-made military equipment for the Ukraine fight.
Trump has publicly mulled the possibility of sending the Tomahawks, which have a range of up to 1,500 miles, to Ukraine, while Zelenskyy has said a sale of long-range weapons could bolster his war effort.
Trump said he and Putin “didn’t say much” about the Tomahawks issue in a phone call Thursday, but “they did talk about it a little bit.” The president covered the possibility of releasing the missiles from the US arsenal, noting that “we need Tomahawks for the United States.”
Sailors assigned to Navy Munitions Command Pacific, East Asia Division, Unit Guam, load UGM-109 Tomahawk missiles onto the Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine USS Jefferson City, May 6, 2025.
US Navy
“We cannot exhaust [them] for our country,” he said. “I don’t know what we can do about it.”
Trump was more optimistic on Sunday, saying: “If this war is not resolved, I will send them Tomahawks.”
Upon landing in Washington on Thursday, Zelenskyy said the agreement for a meeting in Budapest was the product of public pressure from the United States.
“Moscow rushes to resume dialogue as soon as it finds out about the Tomahawks,” he wrote in X.
At a meeting of U.S. officials and a Ukrainian delegation in Washington, officials from both sides welcomed news of a meeting between Trump and Putin, according to a U.S. official. Officials believed Trump’s phone call with Putin could lead to progress toward his meeting with Zelenskyy on Friday, the source said.
Tomahawks: rare but impressive
The United States would have to be careful in distributing the missiles in light of “underinvestment” in its munitions arsenal, said Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Centers for Strategic and International Security.
The United States has already used Tomahawks in “relatively low-risk operations,” Karako said.
“These are scarce non-nuclear strategic assets and they need to be managed and managed” for high-value targets, Karako said. “It seems to me that degrading high-value Russian assets is exactly the kind of thing they are good for.”
The long range and heavy payloads the Tomahawks can deliver “would enable a remote ‘Spider’s Web’ operation,” Karako said, referring to Ukraine’s stealth attack on Russian military assets using drones hidden inside Russia. “There is no need to smuggle things into Russia” if Ukraine is equipped with Tomahawks and the systems necessary to launch them from the ground.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US President Donald Trump meet in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, August 18, 2025.
Mandel and/AFP
But the United States has recently developed a very small number of ground-based launchers needed for the missiles, raising the question of whether it is capable of providing Ukraine with launchers on short notice.
The US military received a prototype of the Typhon missile launcher in 2022 and has recently put it into operation. The Typhon is essentially a large truck with a trailer and lacks the mobility needed for the Ukrainian battlefields.
In its budget proposal for next year, the Marine Corps eliminated its Long Range Fires program that came online in 2023 in limited numbers. That system was also capable of launching Tomahawk missiles, but the Marine Corps deemed it not mobile enough for its needs.
The Army has now taken over the program as a way to improve the mobility limitations of its current Typhon system.
Oshkosh Defense unveiled a new, more compact vehicle from which Tomahawks can be launched at an Association of the U.S. Army symposium this week.
The platform, which Oshkosh calls “the future of long-range munitions,” is not currently in production, a company spokesperson told ABC News.
Still, if the United States could provide the missiles and a complementary platform, the weapons system could be a tactical threat to Moscow, Karako said.
Ukraine could expect “a chilling effect on the ease with which Russia has been able to operate with impunity not far from the Ukrainian border,” he added.
They would almost certainly come with American conditions to attack, Karako said.
“I wouldn’t expect them to fly through the Kremlin window,” he said.
Zelenskyy has pledged to use weapons only for “military objectives.”
U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet during a U.S.-Russia summit on Ukraine at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, Aug. 15, 2025.
Andrew Caballero-reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
The Trump administration’s change of tone
Speculation about the Tomahawks (and signals from Washington and Moscow) came amid a change in tone by the Trump administration after the president’s bilateral meeting with Putin in Alaska did not result in the trilateral meeting, including Zelenskyy, that it sought.
The Kremlin has said that a sale of Tomahawks by the United States would represent an “escalation.”
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians have noted other weapons systems as part of their wish list, including the Patriot air defense systems.
US allies in Europe have been purchasing US military assets for Ukraine through the Ukraine Prioritized Requirements List (PURL), an initiative spearheaded by Trump to arm Ukraine without spending US funds and touted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at a meeting of NATO allies on Wednesday.
Speaking in Brussels, Hegseth called Russia’s war in Ukraine “continued aggression,” verbiage he has hesitated to use in the past.
“If this war does not end, if there is no path to peace in the short term, then the United States, together with our allies, will take the necessary steps to impose costs on Russia for its continued aggression,” Hegseth said.
A European diplomatic source told ABC News that US Patriot air defenses have been discussed under the PURL mechanism, but that new arms sales to Ukraine will largely depend on the high-stakes meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy on Friday.
Matthew Whitaker, the US ambassador to NATO, said this week that the Tomahawks would put “much of Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure at risk.”
“Putin will continue to get weaker and weaker,” Whitaker said. However, the decision to send them to Ukraine will be up to the president, he said.
