Donald Trump, the president of the United States, has made it clear that he will likely meet with Vladimir Putin this month in a broadside effectively accusing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of being to blame for the Russian invasion.
Trump refuted claims that Kyiv had been denied a seat at talks to end Russia’s conflict in Ukraine after the US and Russian officials met for their first round of talks on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia.
“I believe I have the authority to put an end to this war, and I believe it is going very well. But today, I heard, ‘ Oh, well, we weren’t invited. ‘ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it…”, Trump said at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
“You ought to have never begun it,” he said. You might have struck a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine”.
Following the discussions in Riyadh led by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Trump declared that he was “much more confident” in reaching an agreement.
“They were very good. Russia wants to do something, they want to stop the savage barbarism”, he said.
When asked if his administration would back Russia’s demands for Ukrainian elections as part of any peace deal, Trump asserted that Zelenskyy had a 4 percent approval rating and that the country’s elections had been suspended due to martial law.
In a December opinion poll conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, 52% of respondents said they trusted Zelenskyy, a 12 percentage point decrease from February.
“Yeah, I would say that, you know, when you want a seat at the table… Wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have to say like, ‘ It’s been a long time since we’ve had an election? ‘” Trump said.
“That’s not a Russia thing, that’s something coming from me, and coming from many other countries also”.
Trump made the comments after Zelenskyy earlier claimed that Kyiv wanted to control whether Washington or Moscow would “decide any terms” of a deal “behind our backs.”
Zelenskyy met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkiye, telling them “no decision can be made without Ukraine on how to end the war in Ukraine.”
During Tuesday’s talks in Riyadh, Rubio and Lavrov agreed to “appoint respective high-level teams to begin working on a path to ending the conflict in Ukraine as soon as possible”, according to the US State Department.
In a later statement to reporters in Riyadh, US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz claimed it was “practical reality” that the negotiations would include discussions of territory and post-conflict security guarantees.
European leaders have struggled to create a unified response to the negotiations amid concerns that Trump is inclined to make significant concessions toward Moscow in order to reach a deal.
While French President Emmanuel Macron indicated he would consider sending a small number of troops to areas “outside any conflict zone,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer stated this week that he would be willing to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, however, on Monday dismissed the discussion of a post-war security force before any agreement has been reached as “highly inappropriate”.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, meanwhile, said he did not foresee his country sending troops to Ukraine.
Following an emergency summit on Monday that failed to produce a consensus stance, France is scheduled to meet with European leaders on Wednesday for a second round of discussions on the subject.
Trump ruled out the deployment of US troops during his press conference at Mar-a-Lago. He also endorsed using European peacekeepers.  , “If they want to do that, that’s great, I’m all for it”, Trump said.
Source: Aljazeera
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