President Donald Trump on Saturday said he won’t waste time meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin again unless a deal on the war in Ukraine is likely.
‘I’m going to have to know that we’re going to make a deal,’ Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One after taking off from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, when asked about securing a meeting with Putin. ‘I’m not going to be wasting my time. I’ve always had a great relationship with Vladimir Putin, but this has been very disappointing.’
He said he thought the war in Ukraine would have been resolved ‘long before’ the peace deal between Israel and Hamas.
‘We have Azerbaijan and Armenia. That was very tough,’ Trump added, referring to the peace summit he hosted at the White House between the two countries last summer.
He continued, ‘In fact, Putin told me on the phone, he said, ‘Boy, that was amazing,’ because everybody tried to get that done, and they couldn’t. I got it done. You had others. If you look at India and Pakistan, I could say almost any one of the deals that I’ve already done, I thought would have been more difficult than Russia, than Ukraine, but it didn’t work out that way.’
‘There’s a lot of hatred between the two, between [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky and Putin, there’s tremendous hatred.’
Earlier this week, Trump said he had called off a planned meeting with Putin in Budapest to discuss the war because he saw it as a ‘waste of time.’
Trump announced the Budapest meeting last week, saying it could happen within the next two weeks.
He also announced sanctions against Russia this week.
Trump and Putin last met in Alaska in August, but no deal was reached following the summit.
Trump met with Zelenskyy last week at the White House, where he seemingly denied Ukraine’s request for Tomahawk long-range missiles.
The president also said that in his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping next week he wants a ‘complete [trade] deal.’
‘I want our farmers to be taken care of, and he wants things also,’ Trump said. ‘We’re going to be talking about fentanyl, of course. Fentanyl is killing a lot of people, a lot people. It comes from China, and we’ll be talking a lot about that. We’ll be talking about a lot things. I think we have a really good chance of making a very comprehensive deal.’