US President Donald Trump said he plans to discuss ending the war in Ukraine with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday and that negotiators had already discussed “dividing up certain assets”, notably on “land and power plants”. “We want to see if we can bring that war to an end. Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance,” Trump said while speaking to reporters on a late flight on Air Force Once, travelling back from Florida to the Washington area.
“A lot of work’s been done over the weekend,” Trump told reporters. “We will be talking about land. We will be talking about power plants. I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides, Ukraine and Russia. We are already talking about that, dividing up certain assets.”
Trump’s commercial attitude raises doubts about the viability of the proposal for a 30-day ceasefire already accepted by Ukraine last week. Will Russia’s Vladimir Putin consent? Billionaire Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy (who, despite being officially the envoy for the Middle East, appears now to be the White House’s top diplomat) travelled to Moscow during the weekend, meeting Putin for several hours and reporting that the Russian president “accepts the philosophy” of the peace plan and that he was met with a “positive” and “solution-based” attitude.
Concretely, however, Russia is keeping up the fighting and appears close to winning against the Ukrainians in the western Russian region of Kursk. Both sides are keeping up a campaign of aerial strikes.
Witkoff would not confirm that Putin’s requests include conditions unacceptable to Kyiv (and to many of the EU countries), among which the international recognition of Ukrainian territory seized by Russia as Russian limits on Ukraine’s ability to mobilize, a halt to western military aid, and a ban on foreign peacekeepers to maintain a ceasefire. This last point is crucial for Moscow, not wanting to find European troops from NATO countries at its door. Witkoff added that both Moscow and Kyiv will be consulted during the week.
On Sunday, Russia’s deputy foreign minister Alexander Grushko said that any peace plan should include “ironclad security guarantees”, among which, “the neutral status of Ukraine and the refusal of NATO countries to accept it into the alliance.” He added that, “It does not matter under what label NATO contingents were to be deployed on Ukrainian territory: be it the European Union, NATO, or in a national capacity, if they appear there, it means that they are deployed in the conflict zone with all the consequences for these contingents as parties to the conflict”.
Giorgia Meloni’s Italian government does not accept the principle of European troops in Ukraine either and said it wouldn’t send Italian soldiers. On the other hand, French President Emmanuel Macron said Russia’s permission was not needed, noting that Ukraine was a sovereign state. “If Ukraine requests allied forces to be on its territory, it is not up to Russia to accept or reject them.”
According to Moscow, Russia’s invasion in Ukraine in 2022 was determined by the possibility of Ukraine being accepted into NATO, threatening Russia’s security.
