US President Donald Trump said Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin does not need to make a deal with Ukraine.
“He doesn’t have to make a deal, because if he wanted, he’d get the whole country,” Trump said during an interview with Fox News Radio.
The comments come ahead of an expected second round of negotiations aimed at ending Russia’s three-year war on Ukraine. An initial round of bilateral talks held in Saudi Arabia concluded Tuesday with the Kremlin and Washington agreeing to continue work on efforts to bring the war to an end.
Trump said Zelenskyy has been at “meetings for three years, and nothing got done. So I don’t think he’s very important to be at meetings, to be honest with you.”
“He’s been there for three years. He makes it very hard to make deals. But look what’s happened to his country. It’s been demolished,” said the US president.
He added that if Zelenskyy were to call him, he would “of course” take the call.
Trump said he believes he could get Russia to agree to release the roughly 20,000 Ukrainian children who were abducted by Moscow’s forces and forcibly transferred to Russia as a good faith effort to show their sincerity in the negotiations.
“I was hearing about it yesterday. It’s pretty tough stuff, but I believe I could do that. Yes,” he said.
Trump appeared to back off from earlier remarks in which he faulted Ukraine for starting the Russian war, acknowledging that “Russia attacked, but there was no reason for them to attack.”
“You could have talked him out. There was no reason that he should have attacked. That whole thing was going on for years. There was no reason he was going in. It should have never happened, that war should have never happened,” he said, referring to Putin.
Former US President Joe “Biden said the wrong things. Zelensky said the wrong things. They got attacked by somebody that’s much bigger and much stronger, which is a bad thing to do, and you don’t do that, but Russia could have been talked out of that so easily. That should never have been a war, and all those dead people shouldn’t be dead, and all those cities shouldn’t be demolished right now,” he added.
Trump has repeatedly vowed to end Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, blaming both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the conflict, which entered its third year earlier this month.
This week, however, he has gotten into a loud public dispute with Zelenskyy, blaming Ukraine for starting the war and excluding Kyiv from the first round of negotiations with Russia in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.
Zelenskyy, in turn, expressed frustration, claiming that Trump is trapped in a Russian “disinformation bubble.”
That prompted the US president to launch a full-scale attack on the Ukrainian leader, accusing him of being a “dictator without elections,” and accusing Kyiv of starting the war, despite the fact that the Kremlin launched what it calls a “special military operation” against Ukraine in February 2022.
The initial push saw Russian forces close in on the Ukrainian capital before they were pushed back.
Frontlines have shifted greatly in the past three years, with Russia establishing a firm foothold in the east where it had been propping up separatist forces since 2014, the same year it illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.