After Calls, Trump Claims Putin and Zelenskyy Want to 'Make Peace' in Ukraine

After phone calls with Russia and Ukraine's leaders on Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump claimed on social media that settlement talks will begin immediately, nearly three years into the Kremlin's invasion of the neighboring nation.

Trump said on his Truth Social platform that during the "lengthy and highly productive phone call" with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the pair discussed a wide range of issues and agreed that "we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine." (Although the estimates for civilian and troop deaths since February 2022 vary, they aren't in the millions.)

"We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other's Nations. We have also agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately," wrote the U.S. president in his post. "I have asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of the CIA John Ratcliffe, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, and Ambassador and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, to lead the negotiations which, I feel strongly, will be successful."

"I want to thank President Putin for his time and effort with respect to this call, and for the release, yesterday, of Marc Fogel," Trump added, referring to an American teacher whose imprisonment in Russia was widely seen as "essentially a hostage-taking situation."

Later, Trump told reporters that he expects his first meeting with Putin to happen in Saudi Arabia, "not in the too distant future."

As of September, the U.S. Congress had appropriated or made available nearly $183 billion to help Ukraine respond to the 2022 Russian invasion. This week Trump said Ukraine should reward the United States with $500 billion worth of precious minerals in exchange for its military support.

After a subsequent call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, Trump posted: "The conversation went very well. He, like President Putin, wants to make PEACE. We discussed a variety of topics having to do with the War, but mostly, the meeting that is being set up on Friday in Munich, where Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will lead the Delegation. I am hopeful that the results of that meeting will be positive. It is time to stop this ridiculous War, where there has been massive, and totally unnecessary, DEATH and DESTRUCTION. God bless the people of Russia and Ukraine!"

Vance and Rubio will travel to Germany for the Munich Security Conference, which is scheduled to begin on Friday. Ahead of that summit, the Ukraine Defense Contact Group on Wednesday held a meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered headline-making opening remarks.

The U.S. president "intends to end this war by diplomacy and bringing both Russia and Ukraine to the table," said Hegseth. "We want, like you, a sovereign and prosperous Ukraine. But we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine's pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering."

"The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement. Instead, any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops," he continued. "To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine."

Anatol Lieven, director of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft's Eurasia Program, explained that "in practice, Hegseth's statement also rules out European troops for Ukraine. Russia has made clear that it will accept only troops from genuinely neutral countries as peacekeepers, and European leaders have stated that they would only deploy their own troops if given a cast-iron assurance by the U.S. that America would come to their aid if attacked—an assurance that Hegseth has just ruled out."

Lieven also wrote:

In his statement to the other NATO defense ministers, Hegseth repeatedly stressed the words "realistic" and "realistically." Realistically, it was obvious for years before the Ukraine War that NATO countries would never fight to defend Ukraine; and on the eve of the invasion, the Biden administration and every other NATO government refused to give Ukraine a timetable for membership. Yet at the same time, they preserved the public illusion that Ukraine would one day join NATO, and they refused to negotiate a treaty of neutrality with Moscow.

Since the failure of the Ukrainian counter-offensive in 2023, 16 months ago, it has been obvious that Ukraine could not regain its lost territories, but Western officials went on committing themselves publicly to this outcome and rejecting territorial compromise. Something in the region of a quarter of a million human beings have now died so that Western establishments could continue to propagate these illusions. It is time to let them go, and we should be grateful to Hegseth for saying so.

Progressive critics of the U.S. policy in Ukraine have long argued that Trump's predecessor, former President Joe Biden, was not leveling with the American people when it came to the likely outcomes in Ukraine and that his failure to foster the conditions for peace talks or a negotiated settlement meant the fighting would drag on without end.

Trump's supposed quest for securing peace in Russia and Ukraine contrasts with his unpopular imperialistic ambitions in other cases—he's recently proposed U.S. takeovers of Canada, Greenland, the Gaza Strip, and the Panama Canal.