On the sidelines of the NATO summit in The Hague, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump spoke about sanctions against Russia for their fourth-year war in Ukraine and the purchase of Kyiv weapons.
On Wednesday, Zelenskyy said he and Trump discussed how to “protec our people” and “real peace.”
The meeting, which reportedly lasted for 50 minutes, came after Zelenskyy failed to meet Trump earlier this month in Canada when the US president abruptly left a G7 summit as the Iran-Iran conflict raged, just days before the US military launched strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites.
Trump stated at a press conference that he had spoken at the NATO summit that he had spoken with Putin about ending the conflict and that he had potential that Russian president Vladimir Putin had territorial ambitions beyond Ukraine.
Zelenskyy earlier stated that Moscow and Kyiv are not moving closer to a ceasefire, saying that “Russians have once more openly and completely cynically declared they are “not in the mood” for a ceasefire. Russia wants to fight. This indicates that they are working very hard to maintain their appearances or that the pressure being applied by the world isn’t still hurting them.
Prior to the summit, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte stated that the security bloc’s “military edge is aggressively challenged by a rapidly rearming Russia, supported by Chinese technology, and armed with Iranian and North Korean weapons.”
Rutte was direct about Putin, saying, “I don’t trust the guy,” adding that the Russian leader wouldn’t approve of the outcome of the NATO summit.
As a response to Trump’s and Europe’s growing security concerns, NATO endorsed a higher defense spending goal of 5% of GDP by 2035.
Putin will remain at home
Putin won’t attend the BRICS summit in Brazil on Tuesday because an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) is still hung over him, according to Yuri Ushakov, a Kremlin aide for foreign policy.
Russia launched its full-scale invasion and conflict against Ukraine in 2023, but the ICC issued the warrant shortly after. A war crime, Putin is accused of deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine to Russia.
Moscow, which did not sign the ICC’s founding treaty, has categorically refute the accusations of war crimes, and the Kremlin has declared the warrant null and void. However, Putin has always erred on the side of caution when considering the possibility of him being detained if he travels to a nation that is a signatory to the ICC treaty and only travels where he is safe from being detained.
Despite Mongolian being an ICC member, Putin’s official visit to Mongolia ended in sectarian mode last September, as his hosts ignored the arrest warrant.
The US was also quoted as saying on Wednesday that the country was still holding back on removing barriers to the operation of their respective embassies because efforts to normalize relations between the two had stalled following initial indications that Trump’s second term as US president would cause tensions to significantly wane under former US President Joe Biden’s administration.
The conflict continues apace.
In the most recent developments in the war, Russian missile attacks on southeast Ukraine on Tuesday caused the death of 17 people in the city of Dnipro and the injuries of more than 200 others, causing damage to dozens of structures and infrastructure.
In the city of Samara, two people were killed by Russian forces.
Russia claims that it has seen dozens of drones flying over its territory, including the Voronezh region near the eastern Ukrainian border.
Source: Aljazeera
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