WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said he made no progress with Vladimir Putin on ending the Ukraine war in a call Thursday, as the Kremlin insisted the Russian president would stick to his aims in the conflict.
Trump’s grim assessment came as US-led peace talks on ending the more than three-year-old conflict in Ukraine have stalled, and after Washington paused some weapons shipments to Kyiv.
“It was a pretty long call, we talked about a lot of things including Iran, and we also talked about, as you know, the war with Ukraine. And I’m not happy about that,” Trump told reporters.
Asked if he had moved closer to a deal to end the war, Trump replied: “No, I didn’t make any progress with him at all.”
Trump’s view of the call was unusually bleak. After most of his previous five calls with Putin since returning to power in January he has given optimistic reports of progress towards a deal.
But he has shown increasing frustration with Putin after an early pivot towards the Russian leader. In recent weeks he knocked back Putin’s offer to mediate in the Iran-Israel conflict, telling him to focus on the Ukraine war instead.
In Moscow, the Kremlin said the call lasted almost an hour and said that Putin had insisted he would not give up on Russia’s goals.
“Our president said that Russia will achieve the aims it set, that is to say the elimination of the root causes that led to the current state of affairs,” Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters.
“Russia will not give up on these aims.”
Moscow has long described its maximalist aims in Ukraine as getting rid of the “root causes” of the conflict, demanding that Kyiv give up its NATO ambitions.
Moscow’s war in Ukraine has killed hundreds of thousands of people since it invaded in February 2022, and Russia now controls large swathes of eastern and southern Ukraine.
Even so, Putin told Trump that Moscow would continue to take part in negotiations.
Moscow has for months refused to agree to a US-proposed ceasefire in Ukraine.
Kyiv and its Western allies have accused Putin of dragging out the process while pushing on with Russia’s advance in Ukraine.
The Kremlin said that Putin had also “stressed” to Trump that all conflicts in the Middle East should be solved “diplomatically”, after the US struck nuclear sites in Russia’s ally Iran.
The conversation came days after Washington announced a decision to pause some weapons shipments in a blow to Kyiv, which has been reliant on Western military support. – AFP
