President Donald Trump said he plans to talk to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to discuss a possible ending to the war in Ukraine. The planned conversation comes after U.S. and Russian officials met in Moscow to discuss the recently proposed ceasefire agreement.
“I’ll be speaking to President Putin on Tuesday,” the president said to reporters on Air Force One early Monday morning after returning from Florida. “A lot of work’s been done over the weekend. We want to see if we can bring that war to an end. Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.”
The president characterized the recent discussion between Russian and U.S. officials as positive, according to Reuters. The diplomatic meeting between Russia and the U.S. officials followed last week’s meeting between U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz met with Ukrainian officials in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to discuss a ceasefire proposal to end the military conflict. Officials announced a joint statement that Ukraine was prepared to “accept the U.S. proposal to enact an immediate, interim 30-day ceasefire.”
“We’re going to tell them this is what’s on the table, Ukraine is ready to stop shooting and start talking, and now it’ll be up to them to say yes or no,” Rubio said after the meeting in Saudi Arabia. “I hope they’re going to say yes. And if they do, then I think we made great progress. If they say no, then we’ll unfortunately know what the impediment is to peace here.”
Russia reportedly previously rejected the ceasefire proposal. Putin aide Yuri Ushakov told Russian media that the proposal, in its current form, was designed to help Ukraine and went against Russian interests.
“I, naturally, commented on the agreements reached on a temporary truce and stated our position that this is nothing more than a temporary respite for the Ukrainian military, nothing more,” Ushakov said. “We believe that our goal is still a long-term, peaceful settlement. We are striving for this, a peaceful settlement that takes into account the legitimate interests of our side. Our concerns are known. It seems to me that no one needs such steps that imitate peaceful actions in this situation.”
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However, early Monday morning, Trump said both sides discussed concessions to reach a peace agreement. The president stated that the conversations involved Russia and Ukraine dividing up land and power plants, and they would continue to discuss details regarding an agreement in the immediate future, Reuters reported.
“We’ll be talking about land. We’ll be talking about power plants,” Trump said.”I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides, Ukraine and Russia. We’re already talking about that, dividing up certain assets.”
