He suggested that the best way to end it would be to “cut off” the Donbas region in a way that would leave most of it under Russian control, after reportedly pushing him in that direction at the White House meeting.
“Let’s keep it cut the way it is,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday. “It’s already cut now,” he added, saying they can “leave it as it is right now.”
“They can negotiate something later,” he said. “— to go home, to stop fighting, to stop killing people.”
Trump’s comments followed a tense meeting with Ukraine’s president at the White House on Friday, and are seen as a sharp reversal from the stance he expressed in September, when he said he believed Ukraine could retake all of its territory and “go even further” into Russia. At the time he had described Russia as a “paper tiger”.
Zelensky had traveled to Washington hoping after the summit in Alaska that failed to produce progress on ending the war.
However, the Ukrainian leader left empty-handed, having failed to secure Tomahawk missiles despite weeks of lobbying. These missiles would be the longest-range weapons in the Ukrainian arsenal, allowing strikes deep into Russia, even Moscow.
Trump appeared much more optimistic about reaching a deal after a lengthy phone conversation with Putin on Thursday, in which they agreed to meet soon in Budapest.
“Very interesting and cordial” conversations
After meeting with Zelensky at the White House, Trump said on social media that the talks were “very interesting and cordial,” adding, “I told him, as I told President Putin, it’s time for the bloodshed to stop and a deal to be made.”
In the background, according to two people briefed on the discussion and cited by Reuters, . The same sources described the meeting as tense, with the Ukrainian delegation leaving disappointed.
The sources said Trump appeared to be swayed by Thursday’s phone call with Putin, in which, according to the Washington Post, the Russian president proposed a territorial swap: Ukraine to cede the Donetsk and Lugansk regions in exchange for Russian withdrawal from parts of Zaporizhia and Kherson.
Pressure from Witkoff
According to Reuters, among those who most strongly pressed the Ukrainians to accept the “territory swap” proposal was US special envoy Steve Witkoff.
In an interview with Fox News on Thursday, before the meeting with Zelensky, Trump was asked if Putin would accept an end to the war “without taking significant territory from Ukraine.” Trump replied: “Hey, he’ll get something.”
“They fought, and he has a lot of land. It has gained some ground,” he said. “We are the only nation that wins a war and then leaves.”
The interview aired Sunday, but was taped before Trump’s phone call with Putin and his meeting with Zelensky.
On Sunday night, flying from Florida to Washington, Trump reiterated his position that Ukraine would need to cede territory, stopping the fighting “on the lines where they are now.”
“The rest is very difficult to negotiate if you start saying ‘you get this, we get that,'” he added. “You know, there are so many different combinations.”
When asked if he told Zelensky that Ukraine should hand over the entire Donbas region to Russia, he said no.
Zelensky, for his part, called on European and American allies to take decisive steps, saying the time had come for another meeting of the “alliance of the willing” led by Europe.
“Ukraine will never offer ransoms to terrorists for their crimes, and we rely on our partners to uphold this position,” Zelensky wrote on social media on Sunday.
