Trump-Putin summit: Zelenskyy to travel to DC on Monday to meet with President Trump

Asked what was different about a face-to-face meeting rather than phone calls during his gaggle with reporters aboard Air Force One, President Donald Trump said "no difference," then went on to say that there’s "good respect" between him and Putin.

"Look, he's a smart guy. Been doing it for a long time, but so have I," Trump said. "We get along. There's a good respect level on both sides."

Trump also said he liked that Putin was bringing businesspeople from Russia to the summit "because they want to do business, but they're not doing business until we get the war settled."

-ABC News' Fritz Farrow

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is in Kyiv, the nation's capital, on Friday as Trump and Putin are set to soon meet in Alaska.

Zelenskyy said on social media he held a meeting with various government offices in Ukraine to discuss diplomatic work.

"In particular, we addressed the funding of Ukraine’s Defense Forces, auditing the effectiveness of coalitions with partners, special formats, the substance of our bilateral relations in key global areas, and our work at the EU level. I instructed that the foreign policy plan be updated for the period through the end of the year," Zelenskyy wrote on X.

As President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin prepared for their historic meeting in Alaska, Rice University presidential historian Douglas Brinkley noted the state's significant role in past diplomatic encounters.

"Alaska has been used as a stage in the diplomatic game before," Brinkley told ABC News, citing meetings between Richard Nixon and Pope Paul II, and Emperor Hirohito of Japan. More recently, President Barack Obama used the state as a backdrop for discussions on climate change.

4:16

Presidential historian discusses 'historic' meeting between Trump, PutinDouglas Brinkley says that Alaska has been "used as a stage in the diplomatic game before."

ABCNews.com

The choice of Alaska carried weight given its history with Russia, which sold the territory to the United States in 1867 for $7 million after the Crimean War, Brinkley said.

"It's bittersweet for Russia," Brinkley said, explaining that Russia sold the territory to prevent Britain from acquiring it.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's arrival in Anchorage wearing a Soviet Union sweater signaled deeper implications for the upcoming summit, according to Brinkley. The historian suggested the meeting could extend beyond discussions of a Ukraine ceasefire, potentially leading to additional summits similar to the series of meetings between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev on nuclear weapons reduction.

-ABC News' Docquan Louallen

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in a Russian state media readout, previewed a potentially long meeting between the U.S. and Russian delegations.

"We are proceeding on the assumption that there will first be a one-on-one conversation. It turns out that this will be attended by aides. Then there will be negotiations between the delegations, possibly in the form of a working lunch. Then the leaders will leave for a while and then gather for a joint press conference," Peskov said.

"In general, we can imagine that it will take at least 6-7 hours," Peskov said.