By Chris Megerian
Aboard Air Force One: US President Donald Trump says the Donbas region of Ukraine should be “cut up”, leaving most of it in Russian hands, to end a war that has dragged on for nearly four years.
“Let it be cut the way it is,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One. “It’s cut up right now,” he said, adding that you can “leave it the way it is right now”.
“They can negotiate something later on down the line,” he said. But for now, both sides of the conflict should “stop at the battle line – go home, stop fighting, stop killing people.”
Donald Trump boards Air Force One on Sunday.Credit: AP
Trump’s latest comments came after Ukrainian drones struck a major gas processing plant in southern Russia, sparking a fire and forcing it to suspend its intake of gas from Kazakhstan, Russian and Kazakh authorities said.
Trump has edged back in the direction of pressing Ukraine to give up on retaking land it has lost to Russia, in exchange for an end to Moscow’s aggression.
Asked in a Fox News interview whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would be open to ending the war “without taking significant property from Ukraine”, Trump responded: “Well, he’s going to take something.”
“They fought and he has a lot of property. He’s won certain property,” Trump said. “We’re the only nation that goes in, wins a war and then leaves.”
The interview was aired on Sunday on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, but was conducted before Trump spoke to Putin by phone on Thursday and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House on Friday (Saturday AEDT).
The latter meeting was reportedly tense, with two sources telling Reuters that Trump resorted to profanity several times.
The US president pushed Zelensky to give up swaths of territory, did not commit to supplying it with long-range Tomahawk missiles capable of hitting deep inside Russia, and mused about giving security guarantees to both Kyiv and Moscow, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss a private conversation.
Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Friday (Saturday AEDT).Credit: AP
“It was pretty bad,” one of the sources said of the meeting, which left the Ukrainian delegation disappointed.
“The message was, ‘Your country will freeze, and your country will be destroyed’ ” if Ukraine doesn’t make a deal with Russia. A third source denied that Trump said Ukraine would be “destroyed”.
Zelensky reportedly said he would not voluntarily cede any territory to Moscow, but “the meeting ended with [Trump’s] decision to make a ‘deal where we are, on the demarcation line’ ”, the third source said.
The White House and the Ukrainian president’s office did not respond to a request for comment. Elements of the talks were first reported by the Financial Times on Sunday.
On Sunday evening (Monday AEDT), while flying from Florida to Washington, Trump – who plans to meet Putin in Budapest in coming weeks – reiterated his stance that Ukraine would need to give up territory by having the fighting “stop at the lines where they are”.
“The rest is very tough to negotiate if you’re going to say, ‘You take this, we take that’,” he said. “You know, there are so many different permutations.”
The comments amounted to another shift in position on the war by the US leader. In recent weeks, Trump had shown growing impatience with Putin and expressed greater openness to helping Ukraine win the war.
But two sources had the impression that Trump was influenced by the Thursday call with Putin, during which, according to The Washington Post, the Russian leader proposed a territorial swap in which Ukraine would cede the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in return for small parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
One of the sources said US officials proposed precisely that swap to Zelensky in their meeting the following day.
Ukrainians see major strategic value in the portion of Donetsk and Luhansk that they still hold – they believe giving up that territory would make the rest of Ukraine much more vulnerable to Russian offensives, said one of the people briefed about the meeting. That source argued that giving up western Donetsk and Luhansk would amount to an act of “suicide”.
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