US President Donald Trump said on 25 October that Russia's war on Ukraine remains deadlocked due to “a lot of hatred" between the Ukrainian and Russian leaders and a lack of progress in talks. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One during a refueling stop in Qatar en route to Malaysia, Trump said he would not agree to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin again unless a concrete peace agreement was likely.
Trump: “I’m not going to be wasting my time”
Trump made it clear that future engagement with Putin would only happen if a settlement to end the war was realistically achievable.
“You have to know that we’re going to make a deal. I’m not going to be wasting my time,” Trump told reporters, according to RFE/RL.
He added that although he had “always had a great relationship with Vladimir Putin,” the recent contacts have been "very disappointing."
“Every time I speak with Vladimir, I have good conversations, and then they don’t go anywhere,” Trump said.
According to Forbes, Trump said earlier he had canceled the previously planned meeting with Putin in Budapest because “it just didn’t feel right.” He added, “It didn’t feel like we were going to get to the place we have to get.”
Trump noted that he expected the Ukraine war to be resolved faster than the Israel-Hamas conflict.
“I thought this would have gotten done before peace in the Middle East,” he said, according to The Hill.
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He then contrasted the lack of progress in Ukraine with his success mediating between Armenia and Azerbaijan, claiming his role in the conflict resolution between the two Caucasus countries.
“We have Azerbaijan, Armenia — that was very tough. In fact, Putin told me on the phone he said, ‘Boy, that was amazing’ because everybody tried to get that done and they couldn’t. I got it done,” Trump said.
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Despite his earlier optimism, Trump said that entrenched hostility is preventing progress in Ukraine.
“There’s a lot of hatred between the two,” he said, referring to Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “I could say almost any one of the deals that I’ve already done I thought would have been more difficult than Russia and Ukraine, but it didn’t work out that way.”
He also suggested that international pressure on Russia should increase.
“You probably saw today, China is cutting back substantially on the purchase of Russian oil and India is cutting back completely. And we’ve done sanctions,” Trump said, referring to new American sanctions against Russia's top oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil.
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He added that he would urge Chinese President Xi Jinping to keep limiting Russian oil imports when they meet later during his trip to South Korea.
