US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky held crunch war talks in the heart of the Vatican minutes before the start of the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday, as the White House mounts an increasingly urgent push to strike a peace deal in Ukraine.

The president got a front-row seat to Pope Francis’s funeral Saturday. But that particular seat wasn’t the one that mattered most.

St. Peter’s Square erupted in applause for Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Inside the Basilica, he and Donald Trump huddled with France’s Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s Keir Starmer. The occasion was the funeral of Pope Francis — but the optics were all about the geopolitics of the moment.