President Donald Trump said he’ll speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday as the US presses for an end to fighting in Ukraine and European nations rush to bolster their support for Kyiv.
“We are doing pretty well I think with Russia,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday. “We’ll see if we have something to announce maybe by Tuesday,” he said, adding that there is “a very good chance” for a deal.
The Trump administration has pushed for a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine amid a flurry of renewed engagement between Washington and Moscow, three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion. Yet that effort has sparked angst among European leaders who worry Trump may concede too much on Ukraine’s behalf in a direct exchange with Putin and leave Kyiv without any longer-term security guarantees.
Asked what concessions he’d seek from Putin, who has repeatedly brushed aside calls for a quick halt to the fighting, Trump said much of the discussion will be about territory.
“A lot of land is a lot different than it was before the war, as you know,” he told reporters. “We’ll be talking about land, we’ll be talking about power plants — that’s, you know, that’s a big question.”
“We’re already talking about that, dividing up certain assets,” he added.
Putin has deflected efforts to stop the fighting as his troops, backed by North Korean soldiers, make incremental battlefield gains, including pushing Ukrainian forces back from parts of Russia’s Kursk region they’d seized in an surprise offensive last year. US envoy Steven Witkoff met with Putin last week but failed to secure a deal to pause the conflict.
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