President Trump and two advisers spent Sunday trying to recast the lack of a cease-fire in the war in Ukraine as one step in a possibly slow march toward peace. It was a significant departure from the peace agreement that the president said he had wanted out of a meeting in Alaska with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia just 48 hours earlier.
Steve Witkoff, an envoy for Mr. Trump who had attended the meeting in Anchorage, said in a CNN interview on Sunday that Mr. Putin had edged toward making some concessions in talks to end the war, including by agreeing to strong security protections, though not under NATO, that Mr. Trump had floated earlier.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is scheduled to meet with Mr. Trump on Monday, and is expected to be flanked by at least half a dozen European leaders.
In a tandem appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was also at Mr. Trump’s side in Anchorage, took a more cautious approach. He warned that both Russia and Ukraine would need to make concessions to end the war and that a peace agreement might be elusive in the short term.
“We made progress in the sense that we identified potential areas of agreement, but there remain some big areas of disagreement,” Mr. Rubio said. “So we’re still a long ways off. We are not at the precipice of a peace agreement. We are not at the edge of one. But I do think progress was made.”
The television appearances by Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Rubio, who were the only people at Mr. Trump’s side as he met with Mr. Putin on Friday, illustrated just how hard the Trump administration has worked to reframe expectations on a compressed timeline. On Friday, the president said that he was “not going to be happy” and that there would be “severe consequences” if the Russians did not agree to stop the war. By Sunday, all three were hailing progress without offering many specifics.
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The post Trump Officials Hint at Possible Concessions by Putin appeared first on New York Times.
