Trump could meet Putin over Ukraine as soon as next week, official says
Such a face-to-face meeting would be the first between a sitting U.S. and Russian president since Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva in June 2021, some eight months before Russia launched the biggest attack on a European nation since World War II.
Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have not met since December 2019 and make no secret of their contempt for each other.
The New York Times reported that Trump told European leaders during a call on Wednesday that he intended to meet with Putin and then follow up with a trilateral involving the Russian leader and Zelenskyy.
"There's a good chance that there will be a meeting very soon," Trump told reporters.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said: "The Russians expressed their desire to meet with President Trump, and the president is open to meeting with both President Putin and President Zelenskyy."
The details emerged following a meeting on Wednesday between Putin and U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff that Trump described as having achieved "great progress" in a Truth Social post, although later said he would not call it a breakthrough.
A Kremlin aide said the talks were "useful and constructive."
Putin (left) shakes hands with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff during a meeting in Moscow on Wednesday. |
Sputnik / via REUTERS
The diplomatic maneuvers come two days before a deadline set by Trump for Russia to agree to peace in Ukraine or face new sanctions.
Trump has been increasingly frustrated with Putin over the lack of progress towards peace and has threatened to impose heavy tariffs on countries that buy Russian exports, including oil.
Trump on Wednesday also said he could announce further tariffs on China similar to the 25% duties announced earlier on India over its purchases of Russian oil.
"We did it with India. We're doing it probably with a couple of others. One of them could be China," he said.
The White House official earlier said that while the meeting between Witkoff and Putin had gone well and Moscow was eager to continue engaging with the United States, secondary sanctions that Trump had threatened against countries doing business with Russia were still expected to be implemented on Friday.
Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov said the two sides had exchanged "signals" on the Ukraine issue and discussed the possibility of developing strategic cooperation between Moscow and Washington, but declined to give more details until Witkoff had reported back to Trump.
Zelenskyy said he believed pressure had worked on Russia and Moscow was now more "inclined" to a ceasefire.
"The pressure on them works. But the main thing is that they do not deceive us in the details — neither us nor the U.S.," Zelenskyy said in his nightly address.
Trump on Truth Social said he had updated some of Washington's European allies following Witkoff's meeting.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a phone call with Trump on Wednesday. |
UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SERVICE / via AFP-JIJI
A German government spokesperson said Trump provided information about the status of the talks with Russia during a call with the German chancellor and other European leaders.
Trump took a key step toward punitive measures on Wednesday when he imposed an additional 25% tariff on imports from India, citing New Delhi's continued imports of Russian oil.
The new measure raises tariffs on some Indian goods to as high as 50% — among the steepest faced by any U.S. trading partner. India's external affairs ministry called the decision "extremely unfortunate.'
The Kremlin says threats to penalize countries that trade with Russia are illegal.
Trump's comment on Wednesday that he could impose more tariffs on China would be a further escalation between the world's two biggest economies.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent last week warned Chinese officials that continued purchases of sanctioned Russian oil would lead to big tariffs due to legislation in Congress.
The U.S. and China have been engaged in discussions about trade and tariffs, with an eye to extending a 90-day tariff truce that is due to expire on August 12, when their bilateral tariffs shoot back up to triple-digit figures.
Bloomberg and independent Russian news outlet The Bell reported that the Kremlin might propose a moratorium on airstrikes by Russia and Ukraine — an idea mentioned last week by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko during a meeting with Putin.
Such a move, if agreed, would fall well short of the full and immediate ceasefire that Ukraine and the U.S. have been seeking for months. But it would offer some relief to both sides.
Since the two sides resumed direct peace talks in May, Russia has carried out its heaviest air attacks of the war, killing at least 72 people in the capital Kyiv alone. Trump last week called the Russian attacks "disgusting."
Ukraine continues to strike Russian refineries and oil depots, which it has hit many times.
Putin is unlikely to bow to Trump's sanctions ultimatum because he believes he is winning the war and his military goals take precedence over his desire to improve relations with the U.S., three sources close to the Kremlin have said.
The Russian sources told Reuters that Putin was skeptical that yet more U.S. sanctions would have much of an impact after successive waves of economic penalties during the war.
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Japan Times
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Why Hiroshima must keep being commemorated
Nobody should ever say that it was a good call, but it was the only one a U.S. President was likely to make in 1945. The decision to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 80 years ago, was the almost-inevitable outcome of Japanese intransigence and of the technical success of the Manhattan Project, which brought into being nuclear weapons. The anniversary is generating a wave of commemorations and renewing the arguments for and against the mission of Col. Paul Tibbets to drop Little Boy from his B-29, named Enola Gay, over Japan on that summer morning. In the 21st century, many brand the bombing a war crime — maybe the worst of all those committed in World War II save the Holocaust. I disagree. Some 20 years ago, I wrote a book about the 1944-1945 battle for Japan for which I spent months poring over the Hiroshima controversy. I found writing a chapter about it one of the toughest challenges I have ever faced as a historian because the military, political and moral issues are so complex. No sane person could applaud the dropping of the first bomb, and less still that of the second, which annihilated Nagasaki on Aug. 9. Yet I defend U.S. President Harry Truman and those around him who shared responsibility for doing so. Many modern critics assume that the bombs represented the worst possible outcome of the war. This is not so. At the rate people were dying in Japan — especially prisoners in Japanese hands — more victims would have perished than the 100,000 (a conservative guesstimate) who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had the struggle continued for even a few weeks longer. Moreover, during the earlier months of 1945, conventional bombing of Japanese cities by B-29s had already killed more than 300,000, one-third of these in the March 9 fire-raising assault on Tokyo. 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The German generals who claimed that, if Hitler had followed their advice, they could have kept the European war going for months longer, ignored the near certainty that in such circumstances, the first nuclear weapon would have fallen on Berlin. As it was, even after Hiroshima most of the Japanese leadership persisted in resisting surrender. Their obduracy provided an excuse for the far less defensible detonation of the second bomb, Fat Man, on Nagasaki because there was a desire to test its technology. Nonetheless the decisive factor in the belated Japanese surrender, conveyed to the Americans on Aug. 14, was the Russian declaration of war on Japan and invasion of Manchuria. Stalin had known of the American nuclear program through his agents in the West but was devastated by news of Hiroshima because he worried Tokyo would quit immediately, denying him the excuse for belligerency and seizure of the territorial prizes he had been promised. As it was, on Aug. 9, the Red Army launched its assault and secured Stalin's booty. Many of the Western critics who today denounce the bombs are essentially arguing that the U.S. should have saved the Japanese people from the madness of their own leaders. Yet in the sixth year of a horrific global struggle that had desensitized all its participants in various degrees, this was asking too much. I believe Truman would have a stronger moral case in the eyes of posterity had the U.S. given an explicit public warning to Japan if they kept fighting. In July 1945, the allies did threaten dire consequences but failed to specify what these would be. Moreover, there seems a good argument that Hiroshima and Nagasaki have done much to preserve mankind ever since. The mushroom cloud, the ghastly images of the horrors of nuclear warfare, leave no room for doubt that if any nation resorts to such weapons, we are doomed. Even the world's vilest dictators recognize this. 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