The president of the United States, Donald Trump, said this Sunday that he will talk to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, this Tuesday, within the framework of the recent negotiations aimed at treating the US initiative on a high fire of days in Ukraine, a plan for which the Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelenski, has already declared himself willing to apply it.
“I think we are doing quite well with Russia. We’ll see if we have something to announce, maybe for Tuesday,” Trump said in statements to journalists aboard the ‘Air Force One’ back to Washington from Florida. He also said that there are “many possibilities” to reach an agreement, since “a lot has worked during the weekend” to “end that war.”
When asked about what concessions I would ask Putin to reach an agreement, the White House tenant has affirmed that much of the conversation will deal with the territory: “We will talk about land, we will talk about energy plants,” he said before adding that they were already discussing “dividing certain assets.”
Hours before, the special envoy of the White House Steve Witkoff announced that Trump and Putin will keep this week a “very good and positive” conversation. “It seems very beneficial to me. I think it shows that there is a positive impulse, a will on the part of both countries, and also of Ukraine, to move towards lasting peace,” he said.
Although Zelenski said he was ready to immediately accept the plan proposed by Washington, Putin was reluctant because he still does not address “the deep causes of the conflict”, a term used by the Kremlin to describe the influence of NATO on Ukraine.
In fact, Russian Foreign Vice Minister Alexander Grushko has requested in an interview with the newspaper ‘Izvestia’ that the exclusion of NATO Ukraine is in the peace agreement: “We will demand that this agreement includes railway security guarantees because only through its training it will be possible to achieve lasting peace in Ukraine and strengthen regional security in general.”
“Part of these guarantees should be the neutral status of Ukraine and the refusal of NATO countries to accept it as a member of the Alliance. In fact, it was precisely this provision that was recorded in the drafts of said agreements,” said the Russian diplomat.
As for the announcement of several European countries, such as the United Kingdom and France, to send a peace force to supervise a high fire in Ukraine, the statements of Putin and the Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, in which they rejected this possibility has echoed.
“We do not care at all under which label can be deployed by NATO contingents in the territory of Ukraine: be it the European Union, NATO or national title. In any case, if they appear there it means that they are being deployed in a conflict zone, with all the consequences that this implies for these contingents as parties in the conflict,” he said.
Thus, he has considered that “the Merco made of peace maintenance is an attempt to put the car in front of the horses.” “The question of some kind of international support to the agreement can only be addressed once it has been prepared,” he said, before adding that “for now it is only a waste of time.”
