President Donald Trump said Friday he will give Russian President Vladimir Putin “a couple of weeks,” further extending his deadline for potential consequences against Moscow after urging the Russian leader to meet with his Ukrainian counterpart in hopes of ending the war.
Asked by CNN’s Alayna Treene if there’s a possibility he does nothing if Putin doesn’t come to the table, Trump said, “We’ll see. I’ll see whose fault it is.”
“If there are reasons why, I will understand that; I know exactly what I’m doing. We’re going to see whether or not they have a meeting, that will be interesting to see, and if they don’t, why didn’t they have a meeting? Because I told them to have a meeting,” Trump said.
“But I’ll know in two weeks what I’m going to do,” Trump added, reprising a timeline he’s repeatedly issued to determine Putin’s willingness to end the war in Ukraine.
His latest comments come as the momentum around peace talks has stalled, with no sign that the bilateral meeting the White House has pushed is happening. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said earlier on Friday that there were no plans for a meeting between the two leaders.
After Trump met with Putin in Alaska last week and hosted Zelensky and European leaders at the White House earlier this week, he’d teased a bilateral meeting, potentially to be followed by a trilateral meeting he would join.
“You understand that I wanted to have a meeting with those two. I could have been at the meeting, but a lot of people think that nothing’s going to come out of that meeting. ‘You have to be there.’ Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not, but we’re going to see in the meantime, people continue to die,” Trump said Friday.
Trump repeated his two-week timeframe several times. “We’ll see what happens. I think in two weeks, we’ll know which way I’m going, because I’m going to go one way or the other, and they’ll learn which way.”
Trump also pulled out from the Resolute Desk a photo of him and Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, that he said the Russian leader had sent him.
“I was just sent a picture from someone who wants to be there very badly,” Trump said, referring to the World Cup. He’d convened reporters in the Oval Office to announce that the draw would be held at the Kennedy Center in December.
“He’s been very respectful of me and of our country, but not so respectful of others,” Trump said, adding that he was going to sign the photo for Putin, who he suggested could be coming to the US for the World Cup.
“He may be coming and he may not, depending on what happens. We have a lot of things happening over the next couple of weeks,” Trump said.
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