President Trump on Saturday said the lack of progress toward peace between Russia and Ukraine amid their more than three-year war is “very disappointing.”
The president has attempted to chart a course for peace since the start of his second administration after making a pledge to end the war in a day on the campaign trail. Trump had previously planned to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the coming weeks, but called it off, saying he didn’t want it to be a “waste of time.”
“I’m not going to be wasting my time. I’ve always had a very great relationship with Vladimir Putin but this has been very disappointing. I thought this would have gotten done before peace in the Middle East,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on the way to Malaysia on Saturday.
“We have Azerbaijan, Armenia — that was very tough. 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,” he added.
Trump and his allies had advocated for him to receive a Nobel Peace Prize for his intervention in international conflict. However, the implementation of a ceasefire in Gaza orchestrated by the U.S. is facing uncertainty as Hamas refuses to disarm.
Hopes of ending the conflict in Ukraine potentially took a hit after Trump imposed sanctions on Russian oil companies earlier this week.
“The USA is our adversary, and their talkative ‘peacemaker’ has now fully taken the path of war against Russia,” former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chair of the Security Council of Russia, wrote in a Telegram post.
“Of course, people will say that he could not do otherwise, that he was pressured in Congress, etc. This does not change the main point: the decisions made are an act of war against Russia. And now Trump has fully aligned himself with a mad Europe,” he added.
Trump has rebuffed criticism from the Kremlin for imposing sanctions and said Russia’s “hatred” for Ukraine has posed a significant block to progress.
“I could say almost any one of the deals that I’ve already done I thought would have been more difficult than Russia and Ukraine but it didn’t work out that way. There’s a lot of hatred between the two,” Trump said on Saturday.
He later added that he would encourage Chinese President Xi Jinping to continue to pull back on Russian oil purchases in an effort to influence the end of the war in Eastern Europe.
“You probably saw today, China is cutting back substantially on the purchase of Russian oil and India is cutting back completely. And we’ve done sanctions,” Trump told reporters.
