US President Donald Trump said on Sunday he could meet \u201cvery soon\u201d with Vladimir Putin, adding he believes his Russian counterpart genuinely wants to stop fighting in Ukraine. \u201cNo time set, but it could be very soon,\u201d Trump told reporters, hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to play down expectations of upcoming high-level talks in Riyadh on ending the war. With Rubio set to lead a high-level American delegation at the discussions with Russian officials in Saudi Arabia\u2019s capital in the coming days, a flurry of diplomacy was taking place as the brutal Ukraine war nears its third anniversary. Trump, addressing reporters after a flight on Air Force One, said his team has been speaking \u201clong and hard\u201d with Russian officials, including his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff whom the president said met with Putin for about three hours recently. \u201cI think he wants to stop fighting,\u201d Trump said of Putin. Asked whether he believes Putin wants to seize the entirety of Ukraine, Trump said: \u201cThat was my question to him. \u201cIf he\u2019s going to go on\u2026 that would have caused me a big problem,\u201d Trump added. \u201cI think he wants to end it, and they want to end it fast. Both of them,\u201d he said, adding \u201cZelensky wants to end it too.\u201d Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky meanwhile said on Sunday he believes Russia is preparing to \u201cwage war\u201d against a weakened Nato should Trump dilute US support for the alliance. Trump appeared to dismiss Zelensky\u2019s remarks, telling reporters he was \u201cnot even a little bit\u201d concerned about the Ukrainian leader\u2019s messaging. The Republican had repeatedly insisted he would end the Ukraine conflict in a single day if he returned to the White House, but Rubio stressed it would \u201cnot be easy\u201d to resolve such a long-running, bloody and complex conflict. \u201cA process towards peace is not a one-meeting thing,\u201d America\u2019s top diplomat said in an interview with CBS on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. \u2018Nothing\u2019 finalised Rubio is set to lead a high-level US team to Riyadh, but it remains unclear whether there will be any Ukrainian participation. Rubio said he wasn\u2019t even sure who Moscow was sending. \u201cNothing\u2019s been finalised yet,\u201d he said, adding the aim was to seek an opening for a broader conversation that \u201cwould include Ukraine and would involve the end of the war.\u201d Witkoff and US National Security Adviser Michael Waltz are both expected to attend the talks. Trump and Putin held a lengthy phone call on Wednesday in which they agreed to start ceasefire negotiations immediately. The call blindsided Nato allies as well as Kyiv, with Zelensky insisting there should be \u201cno decisions about Ukraine without Ukraine\u201d. \u201cRight now there is no process,\u201d said Rubio, who spoke by phone on Saturday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. \u201cOne phone call does not make peace.\u201d In an interview with NBC broadcast on Sunday, Zelensky had said Putin was a serial liar and could not be trusted as a negotiating partner. \u201cI don\u2019t think in geopolitics, anyone should trust anyone,\u201d Rubio said. \u201cThe next few weeks and days will determine whether (Putin) is serious or not.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US President Donald Trump said on Sunday he could meet \u201cvery soon\u201d with Vladimir Putin, adding he believes his Russian counterpart genuinely wants to stop…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22939,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22938\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}