Trump casts doubt on Putin-Zelensky meeting: ‘Maybe they have to fight a little longer’
President Trump cast doubt on the prospects of a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as part of an effort to end the war in Eastern Europe, suggesting that “maybe they have to fight a little longer.”
The president, in an interview with The Daily Caller, expressed confidence that a trilateral meeting between himself, Putin and Zelensky could materialize, but had less confidence in the bilateral huddle between the two Eastern European leaders.
“A [trilateral] would happen. A [bilateral], I don’t know about, but a tri will happen. But, you know, sometimes people aren’t ready for it,” Trump told the Caller’s White House correspondent Reagan Reese in an interview published Saturday.
“I say … I use the analogy. I’ve used it a couple of times. You have a child, and there’s another child in the lot, in the playground, and they hate each other, and they start swinging, swinging and swinging, and you want them to stop, and they keep going,” he continued. “After a little while, they’re very happy to stop. Do you understand that? It’s almost that way. Sometimes they have to fight for a little bit before you can get them to stop.”
The president added, “But this has been going on for a long time. A lot of people are dead.”
Trump, as part of his effort to bring an end to the roughly three-and-half-year-war, has pushed for a meeting between Zelensky and Putin. The Ukrainian leader, who also met with the president earlier this month, has signaled a willingness to sit down with the Kremlin leader, but Russian officials have so far rejected it.
For now, Russia appears to be slow-walking the administration’s effort to broker a peace deal to end the fighting. Ukraine has rejected the prospect of making large territorial concessions to end the war, as U.S. and European officials have continued discussing potential post-conflict security guarantees to prevent another invasion.
Trump, again, ruled out having U.S. troops on the ground as part of a security guarantee, but signaled openness to offering U.S. air support to help halt the war, something he floated earlier this month.
“Maybe we’ll do something. Look, I’d like to see something get solved. They’re not our soldiers, but there are, five to 7,000, mostly young people being killed every single week,” the president told Reese in the interview. “If I could stop that and have a plane flying around the air every once in a while, it’s going to be mostly the Europeans, but we, we’d help them.”
“They, you know, they sort of need it, and we’d help them if we could get something done,” he added.
After meeting with Putin in Alaska earlier this month, a U.S. official touted a major concession from Russia, allowing “NATO-like” security guarantees for Ukraine as a part of a peace deal. The commitment does not seem it be in place as Russia is asking for an effective veto over what those security guarantees would look like.
One of the Kremlin’s red lines is European peacekeeping forces being involved with Russian officials, suggesting China as one of the security guarantors.
While the peace talks appear to be at a stalemate, the conflict has continued with Russia launching massive aerial attacks on Ukraine. On Thursday, Moscow hit Kyiv with a large missile and drone assault that killed 23 people and injured dozens of others.
Hours after, the Trump administration approved a sale of 3,350 Extended Range Attack Munition (ERAM) missiles and 3,350 GPS units to Ukraine, part of a $825 million munitions deal to bolster Kyiv’s defensive capabilities.