Washington (TDI): US President Donald Trump said he plans to speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday and discuss ending the war in Ukraine, after positive negotiations between US and Russian officials in Moscow.
“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end,” Trump told journalists on Air Force One during a late flight back to the Washington area from Florida.
He said, “Maybe we can, maybe we cannot, but I think we have a very good chance,” Reuters reported.
The US President is trying to win Putin’s support for a 30-day ceasefire proposal that Ukraine accepted last week, as both sides continued trading heavy aerial strikes through the weekend and Russia moved closer to ejecting Ukrainian troops from their months-old foothold in the western Russian region of Kursk.
Russia said on Friday that Putin had sent Trump a message about his ceasefire plan via US envoy Steve Witkoff, who held negotiations in Moscow, expressing “cautious optimism” that an agreement could be reached to end the 3-year conflict.
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In separate appearances on Sunday TV shows in the US, Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, stressed that there were still challenges to be worked out before Moscow agrees to a ceasefire, much less a final peaceful resolution to the war.
Asked whether Washington would accept a peace agreement in which Moscow was allowed to keep stretches of eastern Ukraine that it has seized, Waltz replied, “Are we going to drive every Russian off of every inch of Ukrainian soil?”
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He added that discussions had to be grounded in “reality”.
Rubio said that a final peace agreement would “involve a lot of hard work, concessions from both Moscow and Kyiv,” and that it would be difficult to even begin those talks “as long as they’re shooting at each other”.
