President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron appeared to largely sing from the same hymnal as the French leader made a hastily arranged visit to Washington meant to shore up transatlantic ties placed at risk by the Trump administration’s apparent switch in allegiances from Ukraine to Russia.
At a Monday press conference alongside Trump following a bilateral meeting and lunch, Macron told reporters that he and Trump had found “several areas of progress” in their talks about the effort to bring the three-year-old war to a close and said the goal of both his government and Trump’s administration is to “save lives” and to “bring prisoners back and bring back families and children, because there's also a humanitarian tragedy affecting the Ukrainian people.”
“We had lengthy discussions with the President, and we spoke about our desire to bring an end to conflicts, to have a truce that is measurable, verifiable, and that enables negotiation of a lasting peace,” Macron said.
The French leader recalled how previous efforts at bringing peace in the region following Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea failed because of the lack of security guarantees for Kyiv and said both he and Trump wanted to “make sure this doesn't happen again.”
“This peace must not mean a surrender of Ukraine, and must not mean a cease fire without guarantees. This peace must allow for Ukrainian sovereignty and allow Ukraine to negotiate with other stakeholders regarding the issues it affects. That affects it rather but it is also a country in which we need to shoulder our responsibility so that we ensure security and stability for Ukraine and for the entire region and for us Europeans, this is an existential issue,” he said.
Macron added that he has spoken with both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and British representatives about the possibility of deploying European-led peacekeeping forces on Ukrainian soil.
“We have committed to building a lasting peace as Europeans, we have committed to being stakeholders in these security guarantees, and we are also well aware that Europeans need to do more for security in Europe, for defense in Europe,” he said.
Trump also recounted to reporters his conversations with both Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin and said there has been “more progress” towards peace in the month he has been in office for his second term than in the previous three years, during which the United States stood firmly with Ukraine against Russia’s invading forces and provided billions in military aid to Kyiv.
“Our focus is on achieving a cease fire as soon as possible, and ultimately a permanent peace. My meeting with President Macron today was another important step forward in that,” Trump said.
Earlier in the day, Trump told reporters that Ukraine’s president could visit Washington in the next few weeks to sign a deal granting America significant access to minerals to repay the U.S. for military support against Russia.
Sitting in the Oval Office Monday alongside Macron, Trump said representatives from Washington and Kyiv were “very close to a final deal” and told reporters he’d be soon meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian leader with whom he’s had a contentious relationship since his first term in the White House.
“He may come in this week or next week to sign the agreement ...which would be nice, I'd love to meet him,” Trump said.
The president added that the agreement would be “a deal with rare earths and various other things” and said that Zelensky “would like to come” to Washington to sign the agreement before submitting it for ratification by his country’s parliament.
Additionally, Trump told the assembled press that his understanding was that Vladimir Putin would not object to European peacekeepers being deployed in Ukraine as part of an agreement to end the three-year-old war that the Russian president started without provocation in an attempt to redraw his country’s borders to encompass territory that was lost with the fall of the Soviet Union.
“I've specifically asked him that question. He has no problem with it,” Trump said.
For his part, Macron said Europe “stands ready to support Ukraine in various ways, supporting its military, and we don't want to preempt any sort of discussions that are currently underway” and stressed that both France and the U.S. share “the same objective” of “building a lasting peace.”
Trump’s comments came just hours after he and Macron participated in a call with their fellow Group of Seven leaders to commemorate the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump repeated his oft-stated claim that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine had he been in office rather than Joe Biden in 2022, and said each of the G7 leaders “expressed their goal of seeing the War end.”
He also said the mineral deal that is being negotiated with Kyiv would be an “economic partnership” between the two countries that would “ensure the American people recoup the Tens of Billions of Dollars and Military Equipment sent to Ukraine, while also helping Ukraine’s economy grow as this Brutal and Savage War comes to an end.”
