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United States President, Donald Trump, will host the presidents of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on Thursday for the signing of what the White House calls a “historic peace and economic agreement.”
White House spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, according to BBC, said DRC President Félix Tshisekedi and Rwanda’s President, Paul Kagame, are expected to formalize the deal, which Trump is claiming to have brokered.
The ceremony follows a preliminary peace and economic pact signed by the two countries’ foreign ministers at the White House in June.
After months of negotiations, delegations from both nations met again in Qatar in November, where they agreed to a framework aimed at ending years of conflict.
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The long-running violence in North Kivu province centers around the M23 rebel group, composed mainly of ethnic Tutsis—a community targeted during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Active for more than a decade and one of over 100 armed groups in eastern DRC, M23 re-emerged in 2021.
Kinshasa has accused Rwanda of backing the rebels, while Kigali denies this, insisting its forces act only in self-defense against cross-border attacks by the DRC military and Hutu militias.
The conflict has claimed thousands of lives, many of them civilians.
Earlier this year, a major M23 offensive led to the capture of two of the DRC’s largest cities. While peace talks have continued, sporadic clashes remain.
In July, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that at least 319 civilians were killed in North Kivu by M23 fighters “aided by members of the Rwanda Defence Force,” shortly after the initial Washington agreement.
Full details of the final accord expected Thursday have not been released. In Doha, negotiators signed two of eight implementation protocols—one on ceasefire monitoring and another on prisoner exchanges.
Other protocols, including those concerning humanitarian aid, timelines, the return of displaced people, and broader security reforms, remain unresolved.
Additional sticking points include restoring state authority in contested areas, economic reform, reintegration of armed groups, and addressing foreign militias.
A DRC presidential spokesperson told the Associated Press in November that any final agreement must guarantee the nation’s “territorial integrity.”
Despite these open questions, Trump has repeatedly cited the Rwanda-DRC process as one of several conflicts he claims to have helped resolve since taking office in January.
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