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President Donald Trump is set to travel to Ankara, Turkey this week for the NATO summit, where he will hold a series of high-stakes meetings even as tension with several alliance members simmers in the background.

The summit runs Tuesday and Wednesday at the Beştepe Presidential Compound, with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte chairing the proceedings. Trump’s visit will be quick. He’s expected to leave the White House Monday night and land back in the U.S. by Wednesday evening.

Despite the short window, his schedule is far from light. ABC News reports that Trump plans bilateral sit-downs with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, along with several working sessions tied to the summit itself.

The Associated Press adds another name to that list. White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told reporters that Trump will also meet with Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa on Wednesday, while his sit-down with Erdogan is set for Tuesday. Kelly confirmed Trump will close out the trip with a news conference before flying home.

The meeting with Zelenskyy carries extra weight given where things stand in the war. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is now in its fifth year, and both Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke with Trump by phone on Saturday, using the calls to congratulate him around the 250th anniversary of American independence.

Zelenskyy said afterward that he and Trump discussed the state of the front lines, where analysts believe Russian momentum has stalled. Ukraine, meanwhile, has ramped up strikes on Moscow and demonstrated it can hit targets deep inside Russian territory. Zelenskyy described a real chance of ending the war and said that conversation would carry over into the Ankara summit.

On the Russian side, Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov said Putin’s call with Trump included the president reaffirming his willingness to help broker a fast end to the fighting. A senior U.S. official, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity, said Trump feels genuine urgency to wrap up the war and intends to press Zelenskyy on how to get there, as per a report from the AP. That same official told the AP that Trump plans to follow up directly with Putin after the Zelenskyy meeting wraps.

No specifics have been released yet on what Trump hopes to accomplish in his conversation with Syria’s al-Sharaa. The meeting comes as Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with Israel’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, a conflict that has complicated efforts to manage the broader situation with Iran. Trump has floated the idea of Syria taking on Hezbollah directly, a suggestion that has caught many in the region off guard.

The summit isn’t happening in a vacuum. It comes as an already shaky ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran holds, and as Trump’s ongoing friction with NATO allies continues to simmer.

U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matt Whitaker said Sunday the summit will serve as a checkpoint on whether member countries are living up to a pledge to spend 5% of GDP on defense. He singled out a few standouts and a lot of laggards.

“Some allies are doing more than others. Poland, the Nordic countries, the Baltic countries lead the way, and Germany is on track for the 5%, reaching it in 2029. But many others are lagging behind,” Whitaker said, according to ABC News.

That spending gap has been a sore point for Trump for years, and he’s continued to question the value of NATO membership altogether. Asked in April whether he’d reconsider pulling the U.S. out of the alliance once the Iran conflict ended, Trump didn’t hold back.

“Oh yes, I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration. I was never swayed by NATO,” Trump said, adding, “I always knew they were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way.”

Whitaker pushed back gently on the idea that the U.S. is stepping away, telling reporters the country “remains a proud NATO member” but also has “responsibilities elsewhere in the world as the world’s only superpower”.

Trump kept up the pressure just last week in a social media post, calling the current arrangement one sided and arguing the U.S. gets little in return for the money it puts into the alliance.

“Ridiculous for the U.S.A. to continue along this one sided path when the relationship is not reciprocal. They were not there for us,” Trump wrote, adding that “the United States spends more money on NATO than any other country, by far, to protect them, without getting any benefit from so doing.”

Whether those tensions ease or deepen may become clearer once Trump wraps up his meetings in Ankara and holds his closing news conference Wednesday.

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