US President Donald Trump told European leaders that Russia’s Vladimir Putin was not ready to end his war against Ukraine because he thinks he wins, reported the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, citing three familiar sources with the conversation.
Trump thanked during a call with European leaders after his telephone call with Putin on Monday.
This marks a notable departure for Trump, who repeatedly said that he thought that his Russian counterpart was really interested in peace and that kyiv had forced to make major concessions, in particular the abandonment of his NATO aspirations, to end the war.
Awareness does not seem to have motivated Trump to increase American pressure on Russia. Although he has already told European officials that he would join them to impose new sanctions on Russia if Putin did not accept a cease-fire during Monday call Trump finally refused to do so.
And publicly, Trump said that the “tone and the spirit of conversation (with Putin) were excellent”.
According to the New York Times, after his call with Putin, Trump told the Ukrainian chief Volodymyr Zelensky and other European heads of state that they should find a solution to the war themselves.
The Vatican is expected to host the next series of peace talks in Russia-Ukraine in mid-June.
Trump told European leaders on Sunday that he would send Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Envoy Keith Kellogg to attend the negotiations, but “seemed to be not engaged” on the American role in conferences, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Trump promised to quickly negotiate a resolution in the invasion of Russia at three years from Ukraine when he took office in January. But he has expressed increasing frustration in recent months, because the diplomacy of the shuttle of his administration between Moscow and kyiv failed to reach a breakthrough.
Russia and Ukraine had their first direct talks in three years in Istanbul on May 16, a meeting that ended without major progress towards peace.
During the talks, the Russian delegation, a junior team led by the Kremlin assistant, Vladimir Medinsky, would have demanded that Kyiv fully abandon the four Ukrainian regions which, according to Moscow, are a Russian territory but does not fully occupy. Russian negotiators threatened to seize more Ukrainian regions if this request was not satisfied.
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