"We Are Already Talking About Dividing Certain Assets": Trump On Talks With Putin
In a major shift of events, United States sort of turned its back on Ukraine, and tend to lend hands to Russia. After the bitter exchange of words with Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy, President Donald Trump now said he plans to discuss ending the war in Ukraine with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that negotiators had already discussed “dividing up certain assets”. He said the two leaders will be talking about land, and power plants.
“I’ll be speaking to President Putin on Tuesday. A lot of work’s been done over the weekend,” Trump told reporters. “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”, he said.
The Republican is seeking the Russian President’s support for a 30-day ceasefire proposal which Ukraine had accepted last week. Both Kyiv and Moscow has continued trading heavy aerial strikes through the weekend and Russia moved closer to ejecting Ukrainian forces from their months-old foothold in the western Russian region of Kursk.
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“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 said.
The US President’s comment came hours after his special envoy Steve Witkoff, said that the Russian president “accepts the philosophy” of Trump’s ceasefire and peace terms. Speaking to CNN, Witkoff said that discussions with Putin over several hours last week had been “positive” and “solution-based”. However, he refused to confirm when asked whether Putin’s demands included the surrender of Ukrainian forces in Kursk, international recognition of Ukrainian territory seized by Russia as Russian, limits on Ukraine’s ability to mobilise, a halt to western military aid, and a ban on foreign peacekeepers.
Putin said he supported a truce deal but outlined numerous details that need to be negotiated before the deal can be completed, like his disagreement to the deployment of European troops to provide security guarantees for Ukraine after any eventual ceasefire.
Lats week, The French President Emmanuel Macron said Russia’s permission was not needed, and noted that Ukraine was a sovereign society. “If Ukraine requests allied forces to be on its territory, it is not up to Russia to accept or reject them”, he said as quoted by several French newspapers.
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His remarks came after Russia’s deputy foreign minister Alexander Grushko said that any long-lasting peace treaty on Ukraine must meet Moscow’s demands.
“We will demand that ironclad security guarantees become part of this agreement…Part of these guarantees should be the neutral status of Ukraine, the refusal of Nato countries to accept it into the alliance”, he said as quoted by media.
On the possibility of the potential deployment of European troops in Kyiv, he said 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”.
The Russian President has said that Moscow’s military incursion into Ukraine was because Nato’s creeping expansion threatened Russia’s security. He demanded that Ukraine drop its Nato ambitions, that Russia keeps control of all Ukrainian territory seized, and that the size of the Ukrainian army be limited. He also wanted the western sanctions on Russia be reversed and a presidential election in Ukraine, which Kyiv says is premature while martial law is in force.
(With inputs from agencies)
