Trump Left Fuming After World Leaders Gang Up on Him Over Putin
European leaders reportedly torched the U.S. president during a virtual call ahead of Russian President Vladimir Putin's Friday trip to Alaska, two sources familiar with the call told Axios.
Trump downplayed the historic contact between the two superpowers as a 'feel-out' meeting, though the Europeans disagreed, claiming in the Wednesday call that Trump was leveraging his time with Putin to coordinate a ceasefire arrangement in Ukraine without that country's leader, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, at the negotiating table.
The call lasted for more than an hour and featured several snipes at Trump from French President Emmanuel Macron, who took a 'very tough' position on the meeting, according to a source on the call that spoke with Axios. Macron emphasized that 'a meeting is a very big thing to give to Putin.' But Trump 'didn't like that,' the source said.
Zelenskiy offered his own blunt warning to Trump, underscoring to the U.S. leader that 'Putin cannot be trusted.'
Polish President Karol Nawrocki 'reminded Trump of the Battle of Warsaw, exactly 105 years ago, when Poland fought together with Ukrainians against the Bolsheviks in Russia,' reported Axios.
Putin's visit will be the first time that the Russian leader has stepped foot on U.S. soil in more than a decade—but what sort of new ground Trump will be able to gain is not clear. Putin has remained adamant that any peace deal would require 'international legal recognition' of Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, an internationally recognized portion of Ukraine, along with four regions it has claimed in the three years since it first invaded Ukraine.
After the call with Trump, Zelenskiy appeared alongside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, telling reporters in Berlin that the world needed to put more 'pressure' on Russia. Zelenskiy said that he believed Russia was bluffing about the regional economic impact of more international sanctions.
At the same press conference, Merz claimed that Trump had 'largely agreed' that Russia could not be granted legal recognition of the territories it had claimed during the war.
When pressed by reporters during a press conference later Wednesday as to whether he believed that he could use the meeting to convince Putin to stop targeting civilians in Ukraine, Trump responded in the negative.
'I guess the answer to that is no,' he said, 'because I've had this conversation [with Putin].'
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