(AFP) – US President Donald Trump said Wednesday he believes Vladimir Putin wants to end the Ukraine war, despite talks between the Russian president and American negotiators ending without a deal. Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner negotiated into the early hours with Putin in the Kremlin but reached no breakthrough for a settlement to end Europe’s worst conflict since World War II.
The Kremlin said Wednesday that its army’s recent battlefield successes in Ukraine had bolstered its position, adding that the two sides failed to find a “compromise” and that Kyiv’s ties to NATO remained a key question. “I thought they had a very good meeting yesterday with President Putin,” Trump said when an AFP reporter asked him in the Oval Office how the negotiations had gone. “What comes out of that meeting? I can’t tell you, because it does take two to tango.” Pressed on whether Witkoff and Kushner got any sense that Putin genuinely wanted to halt Russia’s nearly four-year-old invasion, Trump replied: “He would like to end the war. That was their impression.” “Their impression was very strongly that he’d like to make a deal,” he added.
Witkoff and Kushner brought an updated version of a US plan to end the war, which included Ukraine ceding parts of the eastern Donbas region and agreeing not to join NATO. However, while the White House had voiced optimism ahead of the Kremlin talks, Moscow said afterward it had found parts of the plan unacceptable. Russia’s advance in eastern Ukraine gathered pace last month and Putin has said in recent days that Moscow is ready to fight on to seize the rest of the land it claims if Kyiv does not surrender it.
“The progress and nature of the negotiations were influenced by the successes of the Russian army on the battlefield in recent weeks,” Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov, who took part in the US-Russia talks, told reporters, including AFP. Moscow insisted it was incorrect to say Putin rejected the plan in its entirety. It also said Russia was still committed to diplomacy, despite Putin’s stark warning that Moscow was prepared to fight Europe if it wanted war. “We are still ready to meet as many times as is needed to reach a peace settlement,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Trump said Ukraine was “pretty well” on board with a US-backed proposal to end the conflict, but said Kyiv should have agreed to a deal when he had an angry encounter with President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office back in February. “When I was in his office and I talked about no cards, I said, ‘you have no cards,’ that was the time to settle,” he added.
The fresh talks come as NATO pledges to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of US arms for Kyiv. NATO chief Mark Rutte said it was positive that peace talks were ongoing, but that the alliance should make sure that “Ukraine is in the strongest possible position to keep the fight going.” Zelensky said that though a window of opportunity for peace has opened, it must be accompanied by pressure on Moscow. “The world now clearly feels that there is an opportunity to end the war, and the current activity in negotiations must be supported by pressure on Russia,” he said in a regular evening address.
Russian troops have been grinding forward across the front line against outgunned and outnumbered Ukrainian forces. Earlier this week, Moscow claimed to have captured the important stronghold of Pokrovsk, but a Ukrainian army unit fighting in the city said urban combat was still ongoing. European countries have expressed fears Washington and Moscow will reach agreements without them and have spent the last weeks trying to amend the US plan so that it does not force Kyiv to capitulate.
burs-dk/md – Danny KEMP
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