Donald Trump is set to make a shock visit to Vladimir Putin in Moscow, according to reports.

He will fly to Russia for a ‘Victory Day’ for a World War II commemoration event on May 9, said French news magazine Le Point, citing sources within the country. It would mark the first visit by a US president since Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which has left tens of thousands of civilians dead.

The reports of a Trump visit to Russia follow several days of the 79-year-old appearing to grow closer to Putin. After sending a team to begin bilateral talks with Russia in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, he has repeated the Kremlin’s claim that Ukraine started the current conflict, and has labelled Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator without elections”.

The Ukrainian president meanwhile claimed Mr Trump was living in a Russian “disinformation space”, which led White House officials to accuse Mr Zelensky of “insulting” his counterpart. Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who is currently leading the Department of Government Efficiency within the Trump administration, meanwhile suggested Mr Zelensky is running a “fraud machine feeding off the dead bodies of soldiers”.

A visit by a sitting US president will likely be seen as a major geopolitical victory by Vladimir Putin, whose nation was effectively shunned by much of the Western world following the 2022 invasion. Donald Trump previously met Russian President Vladimir Putin at a G8 summit in Helsinki back in July 2018. The last time a US president visited Russia itself was in 2013, when Barack Obama travelled to St Petersburg for the G20 summit, and held a bilateral meeting with Putin.

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