Trump: ‘Hard Working’ Zelensky Ready to Give Up Crimea For Peace

President Donald Trump expressed some sympathy for President Zelensky, who he says is now approaching negotiations with a “calmer” and better attitude, stating he has now come round to Trump’s position that Crimea is already lost and will be a price for peace.

“I think the meeting went well”, said President Donald Trump after disembarking from Marine One on Sunday evening not long after returning to the United States from Vatican City and Rome, where he had honoured the late Pope but also had an impromptu discussion with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Zelensky already said on Saturday that he felt the brief talk between the two men — a clear sign of reconciliation after February’s Oval Office bust-up — had been productive and even potentially “historic” but that he did not want to get into details.

Showing a less hard side on Zelensky than has otherwise been apparent of late, and expressing his anger at Russia for their spate of recent air raids on civilians, the massive death toll of soldiers on the front lines, and the horrendous impact of the death of those soldiers on their families, President Trump said of the Ukrainian: “they have a tough road ahead, OK? We had a good meeting, it was a nice meeting… he wants to do something good for his country, he thinks he’s doing a good job and he’s working hard.

“We’ll see what happens, it’s a very complicated deal… he’s in a tough situation, a very tough situation. He’s fighting a much bigger force, much bigger”.

Trump said there is a different attitude from Zelensky now towards him and talks than there was months before, stating: “I see him as calmer, I think he understands the picture, and I think he wants to make a deal.”

Of Russia, President Trump said: “I was very disappointed that missiles were flying… I want to see what happens with respect to Russia, because with Russia I have been very surprised and disappointed that they did the bombing of those places after discussions.”

President Trump went further on Russia’s President Vladimir Putin specifically, telling him to stop prevaricating and to get a deal signed. He said: “I want him to stop shooting, sit down, and sign a deal. And we have the confines of a deal, I believe, and I want him to sign it and be done with it, and just go back to life”.

While President Trump said he wanted to escape such an outcome, he threatened Russia with consequences in remarks that echoed earlier warnings this weekend that: “there was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days. It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently, through “Banking” or “Secondary Sanctions?”.”

Besides Russian recalcitrance, one of the most apparent stumbling blocks to peace has been the now repeated public statements by Ukraine’s Zelensky that he would not — and could not, even — budge from his original stated war aims of a maximalist total victory, with a complete rout of the Russian armed forces from every inch of Ukraine. Yet a compromise may be in the offing here, with Zelensky apparently willing to come round to Trump’s view that, in reality, some of Ukraine is now gone and can’t be won back on the battlefield or the bargaining table.

President Trump said on Sunday “I think so” to the question of whether Zelensky was now ready to recognise Crimea as Russian, and added: “Crimea was given away by Barrack Hussein Obama and by Biden, that’s eleven or twelve years ago, that’s a long time ago. I don’t know how you can bring up Crimea, because that’s been a long time, nobody brought it up for 12 years and now they’re bringing it up now so I told them you can maybe go back to Obama and ask them why they gave it up. They gave it up without a shot being fired, by the way.”

If it does transpire that peace negotiations do lead to Ukraine sacrificing some territory to the now long-standing Russian occupation in return for an end to the killing, and possibly with some form of Western security guarantees, one question to be answered will be how sacrosanct the Ukrainian constitution really is. Zelensky has repeatedly cited it as the reason why absolutely no territory can be bartered away: the Ukrainian Constitution states the nations’ borders are “indivisible and inviolable”.