President Donald Trump on Thursday said Russia’s failure to forcibly seize and occupy the entirety of Ukraine’s territory amounts to a “pretty big concession” to Kyiv as he continues to push for Russia and Ukraine to come to a settlement to end the war Moscow started three years ago.
Speaking in the Oval Office during a bilateral meeting with Norwegian prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Trump insisted to reporters that he is putting pressure on Russian president Vladimir Putin behind the scenes as reporters asked him what he would ask the Russian leader to give up to match the massive territorial concessions he has asked Ukraine to make as a way to find an end to Europe’s bloodiest conflict since the end of the Second World War.
Trump replied: “Stopping the war, stopping [from] taking the whole country.”
He added that not seizing all of the Ukraine’s sovereign land — the goal Putin had laid out when he launched the war in February 2022 and which was foiled by Ukraine’s military resistance — was a “pretty big concession” in his view.
Trump’s bizarre and nonsensical comment glossed over the fact that Putin had always wanted to occupy and control Ukraine’s land and erase it from the map as an independent nation, thereby reassembling a large portion of the former Soviet Union and Russian empire. The reason Russia has not succeeded in that aim isn’t because Moscow has magnanimously declined to carry out an occupation, but because Ukrainian forces have kept Russian troops from advancing through most of the country.
Asked whether his administration was putting any pressure on Russia to accept the terms of a proposed peace deal, as it has been very publicly on Ukraine, Trump replied: “I’m putting a lot of pressure. You don’t know what pressure I’m putting. They’re dealing. You have no idea what pressure I’m putting on Russia. We’re putting a lot of pressure ... and Russia knows that and some people who are close to it know or he wouldn’t be talking right now.”
His claim that not ending Ukraine’s existence as a free nation was a generous concession came just hours after he issued a rare and pointed criticism of Putin in response to Moscowunleashing the deadliest airstrike on Kyiv since last year, killing at least nine people.
In a Thursday post on his Truth Social website, Trump said he was “not happy” with the Russian attack on the Ukrainian capital, which came less than 24 hours after he baselessly accused Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyof starting and working to prolong the war that began in 2022 when Putin ordered Russian forces to invade Ukraine.
The strike was described by the Ukrainian defense ministry as “massive” and consisting of attacks by “cruise missiles, drones, [and] ballistic weapons” in what the ministry called “yet another strike on peaceful cities and Ukrainian homes.” Zelensky, who was traveling in South Africa when the attack hit, said it was “extremely important that everyone around the world sees and understands what is really happening” in his country.
Trump called the Russian attack on Ukraine’s capital “not necessary” and slammed the “very bad timing” of the attack, which Ukrainian officials say left at least 70 people — including six children — injured.
He then exhorted the Russian leader to halt the attacks and get to the negotiating table, writing: “Vladimir, STOP! 5,000 soldiers a week are dying. Let’s get the Peace Deal DONE!”
While greeting the visiting prime minister of Norway at the White House on Thursday afternoon, the president was asked whether he believes Putin will heed his call to stop attacking Ukraine. Trump replied, “I do.”
Trump later told reporters that he believes both Putin and Zelensky “want peace, but they have to get to the table.”
“There's a lot of hatred, there there's a lot of very bad blood. A lot of stress, but I think we're going to — I hope we're going to get there — for the sake of a lot of young people that are dying,” he said.
When asked how long it would take for a peace deal to be completed, Trump replied that he had set his own deadline for talks.
“We want it to be fast ... and I think everybody ... in NATO, they want to see this thing happen. So we have a deadline, and after that we have a we're going to have a very much different attitude. But I think there's a very good chance of getting done,” he said.
Trump was asked about his decision to address Putin so directly in his Truth Social post and whether it was an indicator of growing frustration with the Russian leader. He replied: “I didn't like last night. I wasn't happy with it, and we're in the midst of talking peace and missiles were fired, that I was not happy with it.”
Pressed on whether he’d consider additional sanctions against Moscow, Trump did not explicitly rule it out but said he wanted to take a bit more time for a peace deal to be struck.
“I'd rather answer that question in a week. I want to see if we can have a deal,” he said before adding that he “won’t be happy” and “things will happen” if there isn’t an accord by that time.
The president’s extremely rare criticism of Russia marks a head-spinning reversal from what he was saying less than a day ago when he appeared to have fully adopted Moscow’s position on at least one outcome of the war: The status of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
Russian forces illegally seized the Ukrainian territory in 2014 and up until now the American government had steadfastly refused to even consider recognizing Russia’s unlawful annexation.
But Trump, who appeared upset about Zelensky refusing to recognize Russia’s theft of his country’s territory as part of a Trump-brokered peace deal where Russia would end the war in exchange for having their wartime gains legitimized, said Crimea “was lost years ago” to Ukraine and said it was “not even a point of discussion” in a separate Truth Social post.
Trump also taunted Zelensky in the same post, writing that Zelensky had “no cards to play” and accusing him of making it “so difficult to settle this war.”
“He has nothing to boast about! The situation for Ukraine is dire — He can have Peace or he can fight for another three years before losing the whole country,” he said.
Trump, who has had a rocky history with Zelensky dating back to his attempt to blackmail the Ukrainian leader into announcing sham investigations into then-former vice president Joe Biden and his son ahead of the 2020 presidential election, has repeatedly — and falsely — accused Zelensky of having started the war while pressuring him to make broad concessions and asking nothing of the sort from Putin.
The president’s criticism of Putin comes just a day after British, American and European officials met in London for what were described as “substantive” technical discussions as Vance again suggested that the U.S. would abandon the process unless Kyiv agreed to massive territorial concessions of a scope not seen since the 1938 Munich agreement that legitimized Nazi Germany’s annexation of part of what was then Czechoslovakia.
