President Donald Trump has called on Russian president Vladimir Putin to negotiate an end to the nearly three-year-old war Russia launched against Ukraine, and is threatening to impose further sanctions on Moscow if the Russian leader does not acquiesce.
In a statement posted to his Truth Social platform, Trump said he was “not looking to hurt Russia” and expressed “love” for the Russian people while boasting of his “very good relationship” with Putin – who in 2016 ordered what the Department of Justice called a “sweeping and systematic” effort to interfere in the presidential election on Trump’s behalf.
Trump also noted that the former Soviet Union lost 60 million people when it allied itself against Nazi Germany and with the U.S. and the U.K. during the Second World War.
“All of that being said, I’m going to do Russia, whose Economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR. Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE,” Trump said.
The president added a threat that if a “deal” was not reached “soon,” he would have “no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.”
Trump added: “Let’s get this war, which never would have started if I were President, over with! We can do it the easy way, or the hard way – and the easy way is always better. It’s time to “MAKE A DEAL.” NO MORE LIVES SHOULD BE LOST!!!”
Trump has long promised that he would bring the war in Ukraine to an end when he returned to the White House. He frequently said he would end it on his first day, but the war is ongoing. So far, the U.S. has given more than $65 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since 2022.
It’s unclear what, if any, Russian goods would be subject to Trump’s tariffs, as a series of increasingly restrictive sanctions levied by the Biden administration in concert with dozens of other countries has crippled Russia’s economy and cut Moscow off from much of the international banking and finance system.
A series of sanctions imposed by Joe Biden earlier this month targeted Russia’s energy sector. They covered two major Russian petroleum producers and exporters — Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftegas — both of which are involved in the export of liquified natural gas and efforts to expand the Russian energy sector into the Arctic.
Trump has not spoken to Putin since he was sworn in on Monday, though the two leaders have reportedly spoken during the transition period following last year’s presidential election.
But the newly-minted 47th president said he and his aides are working to arrange a conversation.
On Monday, he told reporters that Putin “can’t be thrilled” about how the war is going and said Russia is “not doing so well” against Kyiv’s forces.
“I mean, he’s grinding it out, but most people thought that war would have been over in one week, and now we’re into three years. So he can’t be thrilled, [it’s] not making him look very good,” Trump said before adding that roughly 1 million Russian soldiers and 700,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died during the war.
Trump also said Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky had told him that he wants to “make a deal” to end the war.
“Zelensky wants to make a deal. I don’t know if Putin does ... He should make a deal. I think he’s destroying Russia by not making a deal,” he said.
In response to Trump’s threat, Russia’s deputy UN ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy said Moscow would need to see what Trump’s definition of a “deal” would look like before coming to the negotiating table.
“It’s not merely the question of ending the war — it’s first and foremost the question of addressing root causes of Ukrainian crisis,” he said. “So we have to see what does the ‘deal’ mean in President Trump’s understanding.
“He is not responsible for what the US has been doing in Ukraine since 2014, making it ‘anti-Russia’ and preparing for the war with us, but it is in his power now to stop this malicious policy,” Polyanskiy added.
For his part, Zelensky told attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday that a sit-down with Trump was in the works.
“The teams have been working on a meeting; they are currently in the process,” he said.
“We are your partner. We know all the sore spots; we have lost our people — we want to end the war this year,” he continued, adding that Ukrainians want an end to the three-year-old conflict “not just quickly, but fairly and, above all, reliably for us.”
The Ukrainian leader met with Trump last September in New York while the president was in the midst of his campaign against then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
At the time, Zelensky said he believed he and Trump shared a “common view that the war has to be stopped and Putin can’t win.”
Trump later told Fox News that he’d “learned a lot” from the sit-down and said both he and Zelensky “want to see this end” and “want to see a fair deal made.”
The two leaders have a checkered history dating back to July 2019, when Zelensky and Trump spoke on the phone just after the Ukrainian leader was sworn in as his country’s head of state.
At the time, Trump attempted to use the threat of withholding needed American military aid a a coveted White House visit to pressure Zelensky into announcing a sham investigation into Joe Biden, who was then a former vice president looking to challenge Trump in the 2020 election.
Fallout from the now-infamous phone call led to the first of Trump’s two impeachment trials before the US Senate.
