The Ukrainian leader’s refusal to discuss territorial concessions is prolonging the conflict, the US president has said
Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky could lose the entirety of his country if he continues stalling talks with Russia, US President Donald Trump warned in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday.
Zelensky had publicly announced that Kiev will not even discuss officially recognizing the Crimean Peninsula as Russian, a key tenet of a Washington-backed peace proposal which it was to present at a meeting with officials the country’s European backers on Wednesday. Following the rebuttal the top members of the US delegation withdrew from the planned talks, leading to the meeting being “downgraded” at the last minute.
“This statement is very harmful to the Peace Negotiations with Russia in that Crimea was lost years ago,” Trump wrote, accusing the Ukrainian leader of prolonging the conflict.
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Crimea’s predominantly ethnic-Russian population voted to join Russia in a referendum in 2014, following a Western-backed armed coup in Kiev. Trump took to his Truth Social platform on Wednesday, declaring
The situation for Ukraine is dire – He can have Peace or, he can fight for another three years before losing the whole Country.
Trump reiterated that Zelensky has a weak bargaining position in the negotiations. “We are very close to a Deal, but the man with ‘no cards to play’ should now, finally, GET IT DONE,” he wrote.
The US has been pushing for a resolution to the conflict, while at the same time trying to secure a minerals extraction deal with Ukraine to recoup some of the billions of dollars spent on arming the country. However, Trump and his administration have been growing impatient with the pace of the negotiations on both fronts, signaling that they may abandon the efforts.
If the US determines that “not enough movement is happening, we may need to move on to other priorities,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview with the Free Press published on Tuesday.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated in response that a peace deal with Ukraine is unlikely to be concluded in an expedited manner due to the complexities of the negotiations. Moscow has said it has always been ready to engage in peace talks, provided they ensure a permanent solution that addresses the root causes of the conflict – while any temporary ceasefire would be used by Ukraine’s Western backers to rearm the country’s military.
