U.S. President Donald Trump said Sunday that members of his administration are already in talks with Russian authorities about ending Moscow’s war on Ukraine.
“We will be speaking, and I think we’ll perhaps do something that’ll be significant,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We want to end that war,” he said, referring to the conflict in Ukraine.
Trump did not specify which members of his administration were in talks with Russian officials or describe the nature of those conversations, only saying that “we are having discussions… already talking, yes.”
When asked whether he had personally spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin over the phone, Trump told reporters: “I don’t want to say that.”
“We are having very serious discussions about that war. We’re trying to get it ended,” the U.S. president said.
Trump also repeated past claims that Russia would not have launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine had he been in office, claims that Putin repeated last month in an interview with Russian state media.
Earlier, Trump’s Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg told Fox News that both Kyiv and Moscow would need to make concessions in talks to end the war.
“I think both sides will give a little bit,” Kellog said in an interview, suggesting that both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Putin would “soften” their positions about territorial claims.
Russian forces occupy large swaths of land in eastern and southern Ukraine, and Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014. Ukrainian troops, meanwhile, have controlled parts of Russia’s southwestern Kursk region since August.
On the campaign trail, before he won the U.S. presidential election in November, Trump boasted that he could end the war in Ukraine before taking office. However, the White House is now reportedly working on a “100-day peace plan” for bringing an end to the conflict.
Putin said last month that he was ready to meet with Trump to discuss the war in Ukraine, as well as other “areas of interest to both the U.S. and Russia.”
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