Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One. Credit line: SAUL LOEB / AFP / Profimedia
US President Donald Trump has suggested that the best way to end the war in Ukraine would be to “divide” the Donbas region so that most of it remains under Russian control, The Guardian reports.
“Let it be divided as it is,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday.
“It's already divided,” he said, adding that “it can stay as it is now.”
“I can negotiate a little later,” Trump said, but for now, both sides in the conflict should “stop at the battle line, go home, stop fighting, stop killing.”
Behind the scenes of Friday's Trump-Zelensky meeting at the White House
Trump's remarks came after a tense meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Friday and will be seen as a sharp shift from his position in September, when he said Ukraine could regain all its territory and even “go further” into Russian territories. He also described Russia as a “paper tiger”, The Guardian notes.
Zelenski went to Washington on Friday hoping to tap into Trump's growing frustration with Vladimir Putin after the US president's summer summit in Alaska failed to bring about a change in the war.
But the Ukrainian leader left empty-handed, failing to obtain long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles. The missiles would have been the most powerful weapons in Ukraine's arsenal and would have allowed it to accurately hit targets inside Russia, including Moscow.
After meeting with Zelenskiy at the White House, Trump said on social media that the talks were “very interesting and cordial, but I told him, as I suggested to President Putin, that it's time to stop the killing and come to an AGREEMENT.”
Behind the scenes, the meeting at the White House degenerated several times into a “full-blown row”, in which the US president pressed Ukraine to accept Russia's proposal to fully cede Donbas, warning that if he wants, Vladimir Putin will “destroy you”, said European officials briefed on the discussions quoted by the Financial Times.
Behind the scenes of the Trump-Zelenski meeting at the White House: Trump, “swearing all the time”, asked Zelenski to accept Russia's conditions: “If he wants to, he will destroy you”
