President Donald Trump said he foresees a ‘very good chance’ of reaching a cease-fire deal with Russia.
President Donald Trump said on Sunday that he would speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to discuss a cease-fire deal that will end the war in Ukraine.
“I’ll be speaking to President Putin on Tuesday,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “A lot of work’s been done over the weekend. We want to see if we can bring that war to an end.”
Trump said he foresees a “very good chance” of reaching a cease-fire deal with Russia. When asked about his expectations regarding Russia’s potential concessions in the peace deal, Trump said that discussions would involve land and power plants.
“We will be talking about land. We will be talking about power plants,” he said. “I think we have a lot of it already discussed by both sides, Ukraine and Russia. We’re already talking about that, dividing up certain assets.”
Ukraine has agreed to enter into a 30-day cease-fire with Russia following March 11 talks between Ukrainian and U.S. officials in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The United States has, in turn, resumed weapons supplies and intelligence sharing with Ukraine.
Putin has expressed support for the cease-fire efforts in principle but insisted that remaining concerns must be resolved before Russia could agree to halt the invasion.
U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff met with Putin in Russia on March 14 to discuss cease-fire terms. In a Sunday interview with CNN, Witkoff said he had a positive and “solution-based discussion” with the Russian leader.
“The two sides have, we’ve narrowed the differences between them, and now we’re sitting at the table,” the envoy said, adding that Trump had also been briefed about the meeting.
Witkoff said that the four regions—Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia—partially occupied by Russian troops are of “critical importance” in the discussions.
He stated that the U.S. government is in talks with officials from Ukraine and Russia, as well as European stakeholder countries including France, Britain, Norway, and Finland, about those regions and other elements “that would be encompassed in a cease-fire.”
