US President Donald Trump is expected to speak with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, this week on ways to end the three-year war in Ukraine, US envoy Steve Witkoff told CNN on Sunday after returning from what he described as a \u201cpositive\u201d meeting with Putin in Moscow.<\/p>\n
\u201cI expect that there will be a call with both presidents this week, and we\u2019re also continuing to engage and have conversation with the Ukrainians,\u201d said Witkoff, who met with Putin on Thursday night, adding that he thought the talk between Trump and Putin would be \u201creally good and positive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump is trying to win Putin\u2019s support for a 30-day ceasefire proposal that Ukraine accepted last week, as both sides continued trading heavy aerial strikes through the weekend and Russia moved closer to ejecting Ukrainian forces from their months-old foothold in the western Russian region of Kursk.<\/p>\n
Trump said in a social media post on Friday that there was \u201ca very good chance that this horrible, bloody war can finally come to an end\u201d. He also said he had \u201cstrongly requested\u201d that Putin not kill the thousands of Ukrainian troops that Russia is pushing out of Kursk.<\/p>\n
Putin said he would honor Trump\u2019s request to spare the lives of the Ukrainian troops if they surrendered. The Kremlin also said on Friday that Putin had sent Trump a message about his ceasefire plan via Witkoff, expressing \u201ccautious optimism\u201d that a deal could be reached to end the conflict.<\/p>\n
In separate appearances on Sunday shows, Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump\u2019s national security adviser Mike Waltz emphasised that there are still challenges to be worked out before Russia agrees to a ceasefire, much less a final peaceful resolution to the war.<\/p>\n
Asked on ABC whether the US would accept a peace deal in which Russia was allowed to keep stretches of eastern Ukraine that it has seized, Waltz replied, \u201cAre we going to drive every Russian off of every inch of Ukrainian soil?\u201d He added that the negotiations had to be grounded in \u201creality.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rubio told CBS a final peace deal would \u201cinvolve a lot of hard work, concessions from both Russia and Ukraine\u201d, and that it would be difficult to even begin those negotiations \u201cas long as they\u2019re shooting at each other\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US President Donald Trump is expected to speak with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, this week on ways to end the three-year war in Ukraine, US envoy Steve Witkoff told CNN on Sunday after returning from what he described as a \u201cpositive\u201d meeting with Putin in Moscow. \u201cI expect that there will be a call […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6908,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6907"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6909,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6907\/revisions\/6909"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}