United States President Donald Trump has said he will “probably” meet Russian President Vladimir Putin this month while launching a broadside effectively accusing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of being to blame for Moscow’s invasion.
Addressing reporters after US and Russian officials met for their first round of talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, Trump dismissed complaints that Kyiv had been denied a seat at negotiations to bring an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it’s 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 should have never started it. You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine.”
Trump said that he was “much more confident” of reaching an agreement following the talks in Riyadh led by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
“They were very good. Russia wants to do something, they want to stop the savage barbarism,” he said.
Asked if his administration would support Russia’s calls for elections in Ukraine as part of any peace deal, Trump claimed without evidence that Zelenskyy had an approval rating of just 4 percent and noted that the country’s elections had been suspended under martial law.
In an opinion poll carried out by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in December, 52 percent of respondents said they trusted Zelenskyy, down 12 percentage points 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’s comments came after Zelenskyy said earlier that Kyiv wanted to ensure Washington and Moscow would not decide any terms of a deal “behind our backs”.
“No decision can be made without Ukraine on how to end the war in Ukraine,” Zelenskyy told reporters in Turkiye, where he held talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
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.
US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz later told reporters in Riyadh that it was a “practical reality” that the negotiations would involve discussion about territory and post-conflict security guarantees.
Amid concerns that Trump is inclined towards granting sweeping concessions to Moscow in pursuit of a deal, European leaders have struggled to form a unified response to the negotiations.
United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer said this week that he would be willing to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine, while French President Emmanuel Macron indicated he would consider sending a limited number of troops to areas “outside any conflict zone”.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday dismissed the discussion of a post-war security force before any agreement as “highly inappropriate”.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, meanwhile, said he did not foresee his country sending troops to Ukraine.
France is expected to host European leaders for a second round of talks on the issue on Wednesday, after an emergency summit on Monday failed to produce a cohesive stance.
During his news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump expressed support for the use of European peacekeepers but suggested US troops would not get involved.
“If they want to do that, that’s great, I’m all for it,” Trump said. “I’m all for it if they want to do that.”
