The flow of a viscous fluid past a cylinder is a classical problem in fluid-structure interaction and a benchmark for numerical methods in computational fluid dynamics. We solve it with the recently introduced radial basis function-based partition of unity method (RBF-PUM), which is a spectrally convergent collocation meshless scheme well suited to this kind of problem. The resulting discrete system of nonlinear equations is tackled with a trust-region algorithm, whose performance is much enhanced by the analytic Jacobian which is provided alongside. Preliminary results up to Re = 60 with just 1292 nodes are shown. © 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.