WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said he would speak with President Vladimir Putin of Russia on Tuesday, as he continued to express optimism that Russia would agree to a proposal to halt fighting in Ukraine for 30 days.
“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday evening. “Maybe we can. Maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.”
Trump said that progress on negotiations had been made over the weekend, and there have been ongoing discussions about “dividing up certain assets,” specifically mentioning concessions over land and power plants.
“I think we’ll be talking about land, it’s a lot of land. It’s a lot different than it was before the war, as you know,” Trump said.
He added: “We’ll be talking about power plants. That’s a big question. But I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides — Ukraine and Russia.”
Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East who has been involved in the peace talks, said Sunday on CNN that he had a positive meeting with Putin last week that lasted three to four hours. He declined to share the specifics of their conversation, but he said the two sides had “narrowed the differences between them.”
Ukraine has already agreed to support the U.S.-backed ceasefire, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has accused Putin of purposely delaying negotiations while trying to trap Ukrainian forces to improve his position in the ceasefire talks.
Putin had demanded on Friday that Ukraine’s troops in the Kursk region of Russia surrender. But by the weekend, after fierce fighting, the Ukrainians had withdrawn from most of the region, leaving them controlling a sliver of land in Russia.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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