The US president claims his Russian counterpart said it was Washington’s turn to try and settle the conflict
Moscow has been trying to find a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine conflict for over a decade, and Washington is more than welcome to try and push Kiev into a negotiated solution, Russian leader Vladimir Putin allegedly told US President Donald Trump.
During their two-hour-and-thirty-minute phone call last month, Putin and Trump discussed Ukraine and the possibility of another in-person meeting in the near future.
“President Putin, I spoke to him two weeks ago, and he said… ‘We’ve been trying to settle that war for 10 years. We weren’t able to do it, you got to settle,’” Trump told the audience at the America Business Forum in Miami on Wednesday.
“I got some of these things settled in an hour,” the US president added, referring to various international conflicts he claims to have resolved since taking office in January.
Reportedly caught off guard by the call, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky visited the White House the following day in an attempt to secure the supply of US-made Tomahawk missiles to expand Kiev’s long-range strike capabilities against Russia. Trump, however, reiterated this week that he is “not really” considering providing Tomahawks, suggesting Kiev and Moscow should be left to “fight out” the conflict.
The US president has long pledged to mediate an end to the Ukraine conflict, which began with the Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014 and escalated further in 2022. Trump resumed direct communication with Moscow earlier this year, but those talks, along with renewed negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, have so far failed to produce a breakthrough. Trump has repeatedly voiced frustration, alternately blaming both Moscow and Kiev for the deadlock.
Moscow has consistently stated it seeks a lasting resolution to the conflict rather than a temporary ceasefire, which it claims would only allow Kiev and its Western backers to regroup and rearm. Russia maintains that any long-term settlement must include Ukrainian neutrality, demilitarization, denazification, and recognition of the current territorial situation.
Kiev and its European allies continue to call for increased Western military support while resisting direct diplomatic engagement between Moscow and Washington. Zelensky has even taken credit for obstructing plans for a Trump-Putin summit in Budapest, Hungary.
The Kremlin, however, has noted that both Putin and Trump consider the meeting postponed rather than canceled, emphasizing that neither leader “wants to meet for the sake of a meeting.”
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