President Trump said he plans to speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday about ending the war in Ukraine after three years of fighting sparked by Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor.
“A lot of work’s been done over the weekend. We want to see if we can bring that war to an end,” Mr. Trump told journalists on board Air Force One Sunday evening. “Maybe we can. Maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed the plans Monday morning, but gave no further details.
The scheduled call comes a week after delegates from the U.S. and Ukraine met in Saudi Arabia and announced a proposal for a 30-day ceasefire. While Putin said he accepted the idea for a ceasefire in principle, he did not commit to a deal and said more discussions were needed.
“The idea itself is correct, and we certainly support it,” Putin said during a news conference in Moscow last week. “But there are issues that we need to discuss, and I think that we need to discuss it with our American colleagues and partners.”
President Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, met with Putin last week.
“We made a lot of progress in that meeting,” Witkoff said on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” Sunday. “We talked about a lot of specifics, and I point to the large gap that existed between Ukraine and Russia prior to the inauguration, and where we are today. We have narrowed the issues between both of these parties, making a lot of progress, in my opinion.”
Witkoff said he expected the call between Mr. Trump and Putin to be productive.
“I think this is going to be a very positive and constructive call between the two men, between the two presidents,” Witkoff told Brennan.
Mr. Trump said he expected his call with Putin to involve discussions of specific assets.
“We’ll be talking about land. We’ll be talking about power plants. That’s a big question,” Mr. Trump said aboard Air Force One. “But I think we have a lot of it already discussed, very much by both sides, Ukraine and Russia. We’re already talking about that, dividing up certain assets, and they’ve been working on that.”
After launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia illegally annexed four regions, which it does not fully control: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Zaporizhzhia is where Europe’s largest nuclear plant is located.
Russia also annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
