Negotiators working to end the Russia-Ukraine war have already discussed “dividing up certain assets,” US President Donald Trump said Sunday as he announced he planned to speak to Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Tuesday.
Trump’s comments come after he announced last week that Ukraine had accepted a US-proposed 30-day ceasefire, putting the ball in Russia’s court as to whether it would accept his proposal to swiftly end the war.
“We’re doing pretty well, I think, with Russia. We’ll see if we have something to announce maybe by Tuesday, I’ll be speaking to President Putin on Tuesday,” he told reporters on board Air Force One during a flight back to the White House after his weekend at Mar-a-Lago.
“A lot of work’s been done over the weekend, we want to see if we can bring that war to an end,” he said. “Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.”
Trump said negotiators had already pinpointed certain topics up for discussion.
“We’ll be talking about land. A lot of land is a lot different than it was before the war, as you know. We’ll be talking about land, we’ll be talking about power plants, that’s a big question,” he added.
“But I think we have a lot of it already discussed, very much, by both sides, Ukraine and Russia. We’re already talking about that – dividing up certain assets.”
The Kremlin spokesperson confirmed that the two leaders would speak Tuesday but did not disclose any further details.
Putin’s response so far to the Trump-backed ceasefire proposal has been ambiguous. He said that Moscow agreed with the proposal in theory. But he also set out tough conditions and demanded concessions from Kyiv, and repeated his claim that the current Ukrainian government was part of the “root cause” of the war.
Meetings between American negotiators with representatives from Ukraine and Russia will continue this week. The Kremlin also said last week that US negotiators would travel to Russia for further talks, though it did not share details on the participants.
Russia first started seizing parts of Ukraine in 2014 before launching its full invasion in 2022, triggering the largest land conflict in Europe since World War Two. Since the 2022 invasion, Ukraine has lost control of about 11% of its land, according to CNN analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based conflict monitor.
