US president tells media that talks between Washington and Moscow officials have addressed land, power plants and ‘dividing up certain assets’
WASHINGTON – 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 talks between US and Russian officials in Moscow.
“I’ll be speaking to President Putin on Tuesday. A lot of work’s been done over the weekend,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One during a late flight back to the Washington area from Florida.
“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,” Trump said.
Washington and Kyiv’s European allies are pressing Moscow to accept the halt in the fighting, but Putin has given no clear answer — instead listing a string of conditions and raising “serious questions” over the proposal.
“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.”
Trump said a lot of work had been done on the issue over the weekend, which the president spent in Florida, where he has a residence. He landed back at Joint Base Andrews, just outside of Washington, in the early hours of Monday morning and returned to the White House.
Trump, who has upended US policy by shifting closer to Moscow, has described Ukraine as being more difficult to work with than Russia. He held an explosive meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last month that ended with the Ukrainian leader leaving the White House early.
But Ukraine’s acceptance of a proposed ceasefire has put the onus on Russia to cede to Trump’s demands and will test the US president’s more positive view of Putin, who launched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine three years ago.
Zelensky accused the Kremlin of not wanting to end the war on Saturday. He warned that Moscow wanted to first “improve their situation on the battlefield” before agreeing to any ceasefire.
Rubio, Lavrov talk
Earlier, Moscow said that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had called his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov to discuss “concrete aspects of the implementation of understandings” at a US-Russia summit in Saudi Arabia last month.
February’s Riyadh gathering was the first high-level meeting between the United States and Russia since Moscow launched its invasion in February 2022.
State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said Saturday that the pair had “discussed the next steps” on Ukraine, and “agreed to continue working toward restoring communication between the United States and Russia.”
The Lavrov-Rubio call came hours after the UK hosted a virtual summit on Ukraine, at which Prime Minister Keir Starmer accused Putin of “dragging his feet” on the ceasefire.
“The ‘yes, but’ from Russia is not good enough,” Starmer said, calling for a stop to the “barbaric attacks on Ukraine once and for all.”
On Sunday, Kyiv said Moscow had launched 90 Iranian-made Shahed drones onto nine Ukrainian regions.
Content retrieved from: https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-says-hell-speak-with-putin-tuesday-to-discuss-ending-ukraine-war/.
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