French President Emmanuel Macron said Donald Trump had good reason to re-engage Russia’s Vladimir Putin, as he said peace does not mean the “surrender” of Ukraine.
“There is good reason for President Trump to re-engage with President Putin,” Macron said but warned that any agreement over Ukraine had to include security guarantees.
Macron was speaking at a joint news conference with Trump in Washington on Monday.
“This peace cannot mean the surrender of Ukraine,” Macron said.
Trump said the war has meant that “an entire generation of Ukrainians and Russian men has been decimated.”
At the top of a joint news conference with Macron, Trump said of three years of fighting in Ukraine, “What a mess. What a horrible, bloody mess.”
He promised a clean break with Democratic President Joe Biden’s policy in Ukraine, and said that discussions between Russia and his administration were moving toward peace “pretty quickly.”
“The purpose of our meeting today is to end another battle, a really horrible one, a war, something we haven’t seen since the Second World War that is ravaging European soil,” Trump said.
Trump spoke on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which he said Monday “would never have happened if I was president.”
Trump, in broad-ranging comments on the state of the conflict, said Monday he believed Putin would accept European peacekeepers in Ukraine to keep the peace. He also expressed hope the conflict could end within weeks and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would soon come to the U.S. to sign a deal to give the U.S. access to Ukraine’s critical minerals to help repay some of the $180 billion in American aid that’s been sent to Kyiv since the start of the war.
“It looks like we’re getting very close,” Trump told reporters at the start of his bilateral meeting with Macron. He added that Zelenskyy could potentially visit Washington this week or next to sign the deal.
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