Trump plans to meet Putin next week in Ukraine peace bid
Trump hailed the meeting as having made 'great progress,' but he didn't elaborate. A Kremlin spokesman said the meeting lasted three hours and was 'useful and constructive.'
'Everyone agrees this war must come to a close, and we will work towards that in the days and weeks to come,' Trump posted on his social media site.
'President Trump wants this brutal war to end,' added White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Trump told European allies about his plans to meet with Putin and his hopes to broker a three-man meeting between the two of them and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, several American and European media outlets reported.
A face-to-face meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy could amount to a crucial crossroads in the war that Putin launched against neighboring Ukraine more than three years ago.
In announcing his plans, Trump didn't mention his looming Friday deadline for Putin to start talking peace with Kyiv, raising obvious questions about whether the threat is still hanging over the Kremlin.
Trump last week set a stricter deadline of '10 or 12 days' for Putin to wind down the war against Ukraine or start peace negotiations, threatening 'severe tariffs' and other economic penalties against Russia and its economic partners if it refuses.
Zelenskyy, who also spoke with Trump on Wednesday, said Putin's agreement to meet could suggest that pressure from Trump is working, though he warned that the wily Kremlin leader could be raising hopes for peace as a negotiating tactic without any intention of agreeing to end the conflict.
'The main thing is that they do not deceive us in the details,' Zelenskyy said in his nightly address to the Ukrainian people.
Moscow had so far shrugged off Trump's deadline as empty bluster, noting he has given numerous previous ultimatums on various issues that turned out to be toothless threats.
Russia believes it has the upper hand on the battlefield, at least in the short and medium term, giving it little reason to agree to even a brief ceasefire. Its troops have made modest advances along the long front line in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region and ousted Ukrainian troops from a sliver of a Russian border territory that they had previously seized.
Russia has also increasingly mounted deadly missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian civilian targets.
Earlier on Wednesday, Witkoff took a morning stroll in Moscow with Kirill Dmitriev, the Russian president's envoy for investment and economic cooperation, which was captured in footage aired by a Russian news agency.
Dmitriev played a key role in three rounds of direct talks between delegations from Russia and Ukraine, as well as discussions between Russian and U.S. officials, but the negotiations made no progress on ending the three-year war.
Trump has recently flip-flopped to a much harsher stance on Russia after seeing Putin for months spurn his demands for concessions.
Still, Trump has shown himself to be unwilling to take a firm stance of defending Ukraine and sticking to it, giving Putin an incentive to wait out any threats.
The new deadline and threat to impose 'secondary sanctions' on nations that buy Russian energy, like India, China and Turkey, are particularly problematic because those economic powerhouses have no control over Russia's stance on Ukraine.
They're unlikely to cut economic ties with Moscow in response to such U.S. demands, especially when Trump himself was cozying up to Putin just a few weeks ago.
The White House announced it is tacking on a new 25% tariff on products imported from India, raising the total tax to 50%, which suggests it doesn't consider Putin has met the deadline.
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