West Palm Beach, United States:
US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that he could meet “very quickly” with Vladimir Putin, adding that he believes that his Russian counterpart really wants to stop fighting in Ukraine. “No time set, but it can be very fast,” Trump told reporters, hours after State Secretary Marco Rubio would play expectations of upcoming high -level conversations in Riyadh about the end of the war.
With Rubio who would lead an American delegation at a high level during the discussions with Russian officials in the capital of Saudi Arabia in the coming days, a flurry of diplomacy took place when the brutal Ukraine war is approaching its third birthday.
Trump, who spoke to reporters after a flight to Air Force One, said that his team “long and hard” spoke with Russian officials, including his envoy Steve Witkoff in the middle, the president of which Putin recently met about three hours .
“I think he wants to stop fighting,” Trump said about Putin.
Asked if he believes that Putin wants to grab the whole of Ukraine, Trump said: “That was my question to him.
“If he continues … That would have caused me a big problem,” Trump added.
“I think he wants to end it, and they want to end it quickly. Both,” he said, adding “Zensky wants to end it too.”
In the meantime, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zenskyr said that he believes on Sunday that Russia is preparing for “waging war” against a weakened NATO if Trump would dilute the American support for the Alliance.
Trump seemed to reject Zensky’s comments and told reporters that he was “not even a little” concerned about the messages from the Ukrainian leader.
The Republican had repeatedly insisted that he would end the conflict in Ukraine in one day if he returned to the White House, but Rubio emphasized that it would be “not easy” to resolve such a long -term, bloody and complex conflict.
“A process for peace is not a thing of one meeting,” said America’s top diplomat in an interview with CBS on the sidelines of the Security Conference of Munich.
‘Nothing’ has been completed
Rubio will lead an American team at a high level to Riyadh, but it remains unclear whether there will be some Ukrainian participation. Rubio said he wasn’t even sure who sent Moscow.
“Nothing has been completed yet,” he said, adding the goal was to look for an opening for a broader conversation that would “include Ukraine and involve the end of the war.”
Witkoff and the American national security adviser Michael Waltz are expected to attend the conversations.
Trump and Putin gave a long phone call on Wednesday in which they agreed to start negotiations immediately.
The call blindly blinded NATO bondmen as well as Kiev, where Zensky stated that there should be no decisions about Ukraine without Ukraine. “
“At the moment there is no process,” said Rubio, who spoke by telephone with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Saturday. “One phone call makes no peace.”
In an interview with NBC broadcast on Sunday, Zensky had said that Putin was a serial liar and could not be trusted as a negotiating partner.
“I don’t think someone should trust someone in geopolitics,” said Rubio.
“In the coming weeks and days will determine whether (Putin) is serious or not.”
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)