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President Trump has said he won’t meet with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, until a peace deal is reached to bring the war with Ukraine to an end.
“I’m going to have to know that we’re going to make a deal,” Trump said while speaking to journalists on Air Force One as he made his way to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for a week-long Asia tour.
“I’m not going to be wasting my time. I’ve always had a very great relationship with Vladimir Putin, but this has been very disappointing.”
President Trump cancelled a peace summit in Budapest with Putin that was scheduled for Tuesday, in a clear sign of his frustration at the lack of progress towards peace.
“I thought this would have gone long before peace in the Middle East,” Trump said.
“We have Azerbaijan and Armenia—that was very tough. In fact, Putin told me on the phone, he said, ‘Boy, that was amazing,’ because everybody tried to get that done and they couldn’t. I got it done. You had others. If you look at India and Pakistan. I could say almost any one of the deals that I’ve already done I thought would have been more difficult than Russia and Ukraine, but it didn’t work out that way. There’s a lot of hatred between the two, between [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and Putin.”
After cancelling the summit, President Trump announced fresh sanctions on Russia, targeting its two largest oil-exporting companies, as a result of “Russia’s lack of serious commitment to a peace process to end the war in Ukraine.”
The President has indicated he may discuss Chinese purchases of Russian oil when he meets with China’s premier Xi Jinping in South Korea next week.
I may be discussing it,” Trump said.
“You probably saw today, China is cutting back very substantially on the purchase of Russian oil, and India is cutting back completely. And we’ve done sanctions.”
