The president, meeting with Norwegian leaders, is pressuring Kyiv and Moscow to make peace, but not equally.
From: Politico By ELI STOKOLS and ROBBIE GRAMER
Nearing the 100-day mark of his administration, President Donald Trump is pushing Ukraine hard to accept the terms of a peace deal with Russia to end the three-year war by giving major territorial concessions to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But he bristled at the suggestion that he wasn’t pressuring Putin equally.
“You have no idea what pressure I’m putting on Russia,” Trump snapped at a reporter in the Oval Office. “We’re putting a lot of pressure on Russia.”
Sitting alongside Norway’s prime minister, Trump insisted that Russia is serious about peace despite its overnight bombardment of Ukraine’s capital, which he said he “didn’t like.” But when asked what concessions he was demanding of Putin, the president responded matter-of-factly:
“Stopping the war,” Trump said. “Stopping taking the whole country — pretty big concession.”
More than three years after its invasion, Russia’s military has remained bogged down in the eastern region of Ukraine, with the U.S. and NATO allies supporting Ukrainian forces with billions in aid. Trump is loath to consider any additional defense aid for Ukraine, and eager, he says, to end the carnage on both sides. But his impatient push for a major foreign policy achievement early in his second term is running into the reality that for Ukraine and Europe, the considerations at play are fundamental to short- and long-term security and quite possibly existential.
Voice of Ukraine 