Hours after US President Donald trump confirmed that he would meet Russia’s Valdimir Putin this week, Kremlin confirmed the plan and said the two wiorld leaders would speak on Tuesday amid continued efforts to end the fighting in Ukraine.
US President Donald Trump had said he plans to discuss ending the war in Ukraine with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday and that negotiators had already discussed “dividing up certain assets”.
“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,” Donald Trump said.
The meeting comes as Donald Trump is trying to win Putin’s support for a 30-day ceasefire proposal that Ukraine accepted last week, as both sides continued trading heavy aerial strikes through the weekend and Russia moved closer to ejecting Ukrainian forces from their months-old foothold in the western Russian region of Kursk.
“We will be talking about land. We will be talking about power plants,” US President Trump said, when asked about concessions. “I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides, Ukraine and Russia. We are already talking about that, dividing up certain assets.”
Putin Agrees with ‘Trump’s Philosophy’ of Ceasefire with Ukraine
Earlier in the day, Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, said that Russian president Putin “accepts the philosophy” of Trump’s ceasefire and peace terms.
Witkoff told CNN that discussions with Putin over several hours last week had been “positive” and “solution-based”.
But Witkoff declined to confirm when asked whether Putin’s demands included the surrender of Ukrainian forces in Kursk, international recognition of Ukrainian territory seized by Russia as Russian, limits on Ukraine’s ability to mobilise, a halt to western military aid, and a ban on foreign peacekeepers.
What Does Russia Demand of Ukraine?
Vladimir Putin has said his military incursion into Ukraine was because Nato’s creeping expansion threatened Russia’s security. He has demanded that Ukraine drop its Nato ambitions, that Russia keeps control of all Ukrainian territory seized, and that the size of the Ukrainian army be limited.
He also wants western sanctions eased and a presidential election in Ukraine, which Kyiv says is premature while martial law is in force.
Yesterday, 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” agreed at a US-Russia summit in Saudi Arabia last month.
Putin has earlier said that he supported a truce but outlined numerous details that need to be negotiated before the deal can be completed.
Moscow has among other things firmly opposed the deployment of European troops to provide security guarantees for Ukraine after any eventual ceasefire.
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