Donald Trump made an embarrassing admission about peace talks with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, after they ended yet again in failure.
“I don’t know what the Kremlin is doing,” the 79-year-old president told reporters in the Oval Office, the day after his special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner had what Trump called a “reasonably good meeting” with the Russian dictator to negotiate an end to his illegal war in Ukraine.
After the five-hour meeting in the Kremlin, the U.S. negotiators said they believed Putin “would like to end the war”—a message they relayed to Trump on Tuesday evening.
But Trump, who promised to end the year on day one of his presidency, admitted Wednesday he did not know what was going on. He said, “I can tell you that they had a reasonably good meeting with President Putin. We’re going to find out. It’s a war that should have never been started.”
Putin, meanwhile, said the meeting had been a slog. Speaking to the India Today TV channel ahead of a visit to New Delhi on Thursday, he said the talks were “necessary” and “useful” but also “difficult work.”
“What comes out of that meeting? I can’t tell you, because it does take two to tango,” Trump said in the Oval Office.
“He would like to end the war,” he said of his Russian counterpart. “That was their [Witkoff and Kushner’s] impression. Now, whether or not you know that was their impression, you know their impression was that they’d like to see—he would like to see—the war ended.”
He then claimed that one of Putin’s main concerns is reopening economic channels to the U.S. “I think he’d like to get back to dealing a more normal life. I think he’d like to be trading with the United States of America, frankly, instead of, you know, losing thousands of soldiers a week. But their impression was very strongly that he’d like to make a deal,” he said.
Moscow has said that there are some provisions in the U.S. peace plan—drafted without Ukraine—that they are more willing to discuss than others. Territorial lines remain a sticking point.
A senior U.S. administration official said peace talks will continue in Miami on Thursday, with Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Rustem Umerov due to visit.
On Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky canceled planned talks in Brussels with Trump’s envoys.
For the past two weeks, Trump has bragged about his 28-point peace deal as the latest reason why he should have won the Nobel Peace Prize.
“They just divided these 28, I think 27, points into four packages,” Putin was quoted as saying. “And they proposed that we discuss these four packages. But essentially, they are the same (provisions).”
His aide Yuri Ushakov also appeared unimpressed. “At first there was one version, then this version was revised, and instead of one document, a few more appeared,” he said.
Kyiv has also reportedly rejected a revised 19-point deal.
Putin also jabbed at the American negotiating style, saying the U.S. is engaged in “shuttle diplomacy.”
“They spoke to the Europeans, then came to us, then they have another meeting with the Ukrainians and the Europeans,” he said.
Meanwhile, Russian strikes on Ukrainian cities continued into Thursday, with a ballistic missile hitting Kryvyi Rih overnight and injuring six people, including a 3-year-old girl, according to local official Oleksandr Vilkul.
He said more than 40 homes, a school, and gas lines were damaged in the attack on President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown. In Kherson, a 6-year-old girl died after being wounded in Russian shelling the previous day.
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