‘We never make any predictions': Russian foreign minister on Trump-Putin talks in Alaska

Hindustan Times

11 hours ago

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has said that his country's position on Ukraine war is 'clear and unambiguous' and will be put forward at Friday's Summit talks between Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump. Sergei Lavrov was responding to a question by the Russian state TV after reaching Alaska for talks to potentially end the three-year war in Ukraine.(X)
Lavrov was responding to a question by the Russian state TV after reaching Alaska for talks to potentially end the three-year war in Ukraine. He said that Moscow would not make guesses on the outcome of the meeting.
"We never make any predictions ahead of time," Lavrov said, wearing what appeared to be a shirt with "USSR" written across it in Cyrillic script.
According to Lavrov, the Russian position on the issue is clear, but he did not elaborate on what exactly it was.
"... our position is clear and unambiguous. We will present it," he said.
Trump and Putin are meeting in Alaska on Friday to hold the first-ever summit talks between the US and Russian Presidents since Moscow's war in Ukraine started. While the Republican leader has indicated a 'land swap' deal between Kyiv and Moscow, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who hasn't been invited to the talks, has ruled any such deal out.
Zelensky, however, on Friday said that his country was 'counting on the US President' to convince Russia to end the war it began in 2022.
Trump says Putin would have taken all of Ukraine if he wasn't President
Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday that he would know within the first five minutes of the meeting with Vladimir Putin if it would be fruitful.
'We're gonna find out where everybody stands. And I'll know within the first two minutes, three minutes, four minutes or five minutes… whether or not we're going to have a good meeting or a bad. And if it's a bad meeting, it'll end very quickly. And if it's a good meeting, we're going to end up getting peace in the pretty near future,' CNN quoted Trump as saying.
Trump has long claimed that Putin would not have launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 if he had been President, and said Thursday that the war 'should have never happened.'
'If I weren't President, in my opinion, he would much rather take over all of Ukraine. But I am President, and he's not going to mess around with me,' Trump said.