U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday he plans to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin “very shortly” at a soon-to-be-announced location to discuss reaching an end to the war in Ukraine, which Trump said there was “a real shot” at achieving.
Trump confirmed steps toward a meeting with Putin at the White House as Canada said it intends to lower the price cap on Russian oil, alongside Britain and the European Union, to exert “renewed pressure” on Moscow to end the war it started more than three-and-a-half years ago with its invasion.
Friday also marked Trump’s deadline for the Kremlin to make peace or face additional sanctions.
Despite no end to fighting on the ground, Trump expressed optimism that there was progress being made toward ending the conflict.
“I think we’re getting very close,” he told reporters, adding that first “we’re going to have a meeting with Russia.”
“I’ll be meeting very shortly with President Putin. It would have been sooner, but I guess there’s security arrangements that unfortunately people have to make. Otherwise, I’d do it much quicker. He’d like to meet as soon as possible. I agree with it, but we’ll be announcing that very shortly.”
Trump also appeared to partially confirm a report earlier Friday from Bloomberg that a peace deal backed by the U.S. and Russia would cement Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine, though the U.S. president suggested Ukraine could also regain some territory.
“It’s very complicated, but we’re going to get some back, we’re going to get some switched,” he said. “There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both, but we’ll be talking about that either later or tomorrow or whatever.”
If it happens, Trump’s meeting with Putin would be the first U.S.-Russia summit since 2021, when former U.S. president Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva.
On Thursday, Putin said he hoped to meet with Trump as early as next week, possibly in the United Arab Emirates. The White House said it was still working through the details of any potential meetings.
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Trump said Thursday that he would meet with Putin even if the Russian leader will not meet with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That stoked fears in Europe that Ukraine could be sidelined in efforts to stop the war.
Putin and the Kremlin have repeatedly said they are open to meeting with Zelenskyy but only once a peace deal is near completion.
In a joint statement Friday, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne and Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand said the price cap for Russian crude oil shipments would be lowered from US$60 to US$47.60 per barrel alongside the U.K. and the EU.
Ukraine’s allies have targeted Russian oil profits since the war began in an effort to degrade Moscow’s military, while also trying to prevent energy shortages in countries that rely on those exports.
“By further lowering the price cap on Russian crude oil, Canada and its partners are ratcheting up the economic pressure and limiting a crucial source of funding for Russia’s illegal war,” Champagne said in a statement.
The government said existing price caps of US$100 on high-value refined Russian oil products, such as diesel and petrol, and US$45 on low-value refined oil products, such as fuel oil, remain unaffected by the change.
Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to place an additional 25 per cent tariff on India for its purchases of Russian oil, and has warned of sanctions and tariffs for any other foreign purchases.
Ukrainian forces are locked in intense battles along the 1,000-kilometre front line that snakes from northeast to southeast Ukraine.
The Pokrovsk area of the eastern Donetsk region is taking the brunt of punishment as Russia seeks to break out into the neighbouring Dnipropetrovsk region. Ukraine has significant shortages of fighters.
Intense fighting is also taking place in Ukraine’s northern Sumy border region, where Ukrainian forces are engaging Russian soldiers to prevent reinforcements being sent from there to Donetsk.
In the Pokrovsk area of Donetsk, a commander said he believes Moscow isn’t interested in peace.
“It is impossible to negotiate with them. The only option is to defeat them,” Buda, a commander of a drone unit in the Spartan Brigade, told The Associated Press. He used only his call sign, in keeping with the rules of the Ukrainian military.
“I would like them to agree and for all this to stop, but Russia will not agree to that. It does not want to negotiate. So the only option is to defeat them,” he said.
In the southern Zaporizhzhia region, a howitzer commander using the call sign Warsaw, said troops are determined to thwart Russia’s invasion.
“We are on our land, we have no way out,” he said. “So we stand our ground, we have no choice.”
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, said in an assessment Thursday that “Putin remains uninterested in ending his war and is attempting to extract bilateral concessions from the United States without meaningfully engaging in a peace process.”
“Putin continues to believe that time is on Russia’s side and that Russia can outlast Ukraine and the West,” it said.
Yet Trump claimed Friday that he believes Putin “wants to see peace” just as much as Zelenskyy does.
Zelenskyy said Friday in his nightly address to the Ukrainian people that Kyiv and European allies he’s spoken to in recent days agree it was now possible to achieve at least a ceasefire, depending on adequate pressure on Russia.
— With files from the Associated Press
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