WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump told President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday that Ukraine will have to make “compromises” in a truce with Moscow, while Zelensky insisted that there should be no concessions with Russia’s “killer” leader.
“You can’t do any deals without compromises. So certainly he’s going to have to make some compromises, but hopefully they won’t be as big as some people think,” Trump said at a White House meeting.
But showing Trump pictures of war atrocities and referring to President Vladimir Putin, Zelensky said there should be “no compromises with a killer on our territory.”
“Crazy Russians,” he said, had deported Ukrainian children and committed war crimes during their three-year invasion of his country.
Despite the tension over who should make concessions in the search for an end to the war, Zelensky said, “I think President Trump is on our side.”
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He said that he would be speaking to the US president about the “crucial” need for a so-called US security “backstop” to any European deployments of peacekeepers monitoring an eventual truce.
“This is crucial, this is what we want to speak about, this is very important,” he said.
Trump has alarmed Kyiv and European allies with his abrupt U-turn in US policy, ending what had been full-throated support for Ukraine’s attempt to defeat the Russian invasion and casting himself as a mediator between Putin and Zelensky.
Trump told Zelensky that a truce is “fairly close.”
He also said that a deal he was set to sign with Zelensky allowing US exploitation of Ukraine’s natural resources would be “very fair.”
The resources deal is intended to give the United States access to rare-earth and other critical minerals as part of an overall plan to help Ukraine recover after a truce.
Zelensky told Trump that he should visit his embattled nation. “You have to come and to look.”
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