President Donald Trump told the Daily Caller that he doubts Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet anytime soon and that the two nations may “have to fight a little longer.”
“A trilateral meeting would happen. A bilateral, I don’t know about, but a tri will happen. But, you know, sometimes people aren’t ready for it,” Trump told the outlet’s White House correspondent, Reagan Reese, in a Friday interview published Saturday.
“I say, I use the analogy. I’ve used it a couple of times. You have a child, and there’s another child in the lot, in the playground, and they hate each other, and they start swinging, swinging, and swinging, and you want them to stop, and they keep going.
“After a little while, they’re very happy to stop. Do you understand that? It’s almost that way. Sometimes they have to fight for a little bit before you can get them to stop,” he said.
“But this has been going on for a long time. A lot of people are dead.”
The summit in Alaska earlier in the month between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin ended without any concrete pathway to peace. Trump is now openly frustrated that Putin is not open to any in-person discussions that concede Russian territorial gains.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed the likelihood of any such peace summit occurring in the future and indicated Putin accepted merely to “raise the level of its representation at talks with Ukraine.”
Trump, who has indicated he’s willing to use U.S. airpower to support European forces in Ukraine, promised not to commit to American boots on the ground.
“Maybe we’ll do something. Look, I’d like to see something get solved. They’re not our soldiers, but there are, 5 to 7,000, mostly young people being killed every single week,” the president told Reese in the interview.
“If I could stop that and have a plane flying around the air every once in a while, it’s going to be mostly the Europeans, but we, we’d help them.
“They, you know, they sort of need it, and we’d help them if we could get something done,” he added.
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