Donald Trump has attributed Vladimir Putin’s unwillingness to meet Volodymyr Zelensky to the fact that he “doesn’t like him.”
Speaking in the Oval Office on Monday, the US president said that Putin is averse to meeting with Zelensky “because he doesn’t like him, he doesn’t like him… they don’t like each other, really.”
“They do not exactly get along well,” Trump emphasized, adding “the one I thought would be the easiest, frankly, was Russia and Ukraine. But it turns out there are some big personality conflicts.”
After meeting with Putin in Alaska on Aug. 15 and holding talks with Zelensky and European leaders three days later, Trump seemed confident last week that Moscow and Kyiv would carry out high-level direct negotiations involving both leaders.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, that confidence appeared to have evaporated. “I don’t know if they’ll meet. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t,” he said.
Trump also appeared to express some frustration with Putin, saying “every conversation I have with him is a good conversation. And then, unfortunately, a bomb is loaded up into Kyiv or someplace, and then I get very angry about it.”
Nonetheless, he concluded, “I think we’re going to get the war done. It’s tough… strange things happen in war.”
Trump also said that he had talked to Putin about nuclear weapons, saying “we would like to denuclearize. It’s too much power, and we talked about that also. That’s part of it, but we have to get the war over with.”
Asked if the Kremlin would face ramifications for refusing to meet with Zelensky, Trump said that there “would be very big consequences,” before softening his stance to “there might be very big consequences.”
Finally, the US president claimed that people call him the “president of Europe” because of the respect he commands in the bloc, adding “I like Europe and I like those people, they’re good people, they’re great leaders.”
On Thursday, Trump set a two-week time frame for peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow, saying “after that we’ll have to maybe take a different tack.”
It came after a cryptic Truth Social post by the US leader which likened a picture of him pointing at Putin in Alaska to a historic image of US Vice President Richard Nixon pointing at Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which hinted that he may finally be prepared to get tough on Moscow.
On that day, he also criticized predecessor Joe Biden for “not [letting] Ukraine FIGHT BACK” against Russia, likening Ukraine to “a great team in sports that has a fantastic defense, but is not allowed to play offense.”
On Wednesday, Trump suggested that the US may be willing to protect a potential peace settlement in Ukraine “by air,” ruling out US boots on the ground.
Polling released on Monday showed that 66 percent of US voters support Trump’s efforts to end the war, while 52 percent of voters were satisfied with how Trump is managing negotiations, according to The Hill, suggesting the US president will not abort his plans to end the war any time soon.
For Russia’s part, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview released over the weekend that there is “no meeting planned” between Putin and Zelensky, claiming that the Russian president will only meet his Ukrainian counterpart “when the agenda is ready for a summit, and this agenda is not ready at all.”
In response to Russia’s demurrals, Zelensky said that Russia is doing “everything it can” to prevent a direct meeting between the leaders, and urged leaders to adopt “really strong sanctions” against Russia if it refuses to “agree to a diplomatic solution” to the war.
Ukrainian and American officials will meet this week to discuss peace negotiations with Russia, Zelensky said on Monday.