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US president Donald Trump reverses course and says Russia did invade Ukraine after facing backlash
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US president Donald Trump reversed course and said Russia did invade Ukraine after facing backlash for previously claiming that Kyiv “should have never started” the war three years ago.
“Russia attacked, but they shouldn’t have let him attack,” Mr Trump told Fox News, adding that Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and then-US president Joe Biden should have taken steps to avert the invasion.
Mr Trump later said Ukraine had no cards to play with as Washington pursues talks on ending the war with Russia. “I’ve been watching for years, and I’ve been watching him negotiate with no cards. He has no cards. And you get sick of it. You just get sick of it. And I’ve had it,” the president said.
Mr Trump added: “He’s [Zelensky] been at a meeting for three years, and nothing got done. So, I don’t think it’s very important to be at meetings, to be honest with you. He makes it very hard to make deals.”
Mr Trump also predicted a minerals agreement would be reached soon and “hopefully in the next fairly short period of time”.
Mr Zelensky said separately yesterday that Ukrainian and US teams were working on a draft agreement.
A second meeting between representatives of Russia and the US is planned for the next two weeks, the RIA state news agency cited Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying.
The meeting will take place in a third country, Mr Ryabkov told RIA.
He said there was “principled agreement” on both sides to hold consultations to work out “the entire block of so-called irritants”.
“Today we are facing two parallel, but, of course, to some extent, politically interconnected tracks: one is Ukrainian affairs, the other is bilateral,” Mr Ryabkov said.
“A dialogue on strategic stability and arms control is possible when we see visible shifts for the better in American policy,” he added. He also said the US and Russia could discuss the Middle East.
President Donald Trump reversed course yesterday and said Russia did in fact invade Ukraine after facing backlash for saying that Ukraine “should have never started” the war three years ago.
“Russia attacked, but they shouldn’t have let him attack,” Mr Trump said, adding that Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and then-US president Joe Biden should have taken steps to avert the invasion.
Later, Mr Trump predicted a minerals agreement would be reached soon.”We’re signing an agreement, hopefully in the next fairly short period of time,” Mr Trump told reporters in the Oval Office when asked about a possible deal for Ukraine’s minerals.
Mr Zelensky said separately yesterday that Ukrainian and US teams were working on a draft agreement.
“I am hoping for … a fair result,” he said in a video address after sharp exchanges this week between the two leaders.
Mr Trump had denounced Zelensky as a “dictator” on Wednesday and warned he had to move quickly to secure peace with Russia. Mr Zelensky responded by saying, Mr Trump was trapped in a “disinformation bubble”.
The European Union is preparing a package of about €20bn (£16.5bn) in military support for Ukraine, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.
The bloc has been racing to secure assistance for Kyiv in the face of US president Donald Trump’s push to reach a quick peace settlement with Russia.
The initiative would aim to deliver artillery ammunition, air defense systems, deep-precision strike missiles, drones as well as other weapons, according to the report.
Following Boris Johnson’s claims that Donald Trump’s earlier attacks on Volodymyr Zelensky over who was to blame for Russia’s invasion were designed to be a wake-up call rather than historically accurate, our columnist Alan Rusbridger writes:
I imagine Zelensky has better things to do at the moment than read the Daily Mail, far less fork out to read Johnson’s musings behind a paywall.
How stomach-churning it would be for him to discover that the man he once saw as a Churchillian ally is now acting as an apologist for Trump as the latter seeks to undermine, if not destroy, him.
Read his thinking in full here:
Russia claims its forces have taken control of three villages in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
The defence ministry claimed that Nadiivka, Novosilka and Novoocheretuvate had been taken, however Moscow has previously been premature in such claims.
Even as it embarks on talks with the United States on ending the war, Russia continues to make slow but steady gains in Donetsk, a heavily urban and industrial region, parts of which have been controlled by Russian proxies since 2014.
Russia declared in September 2022 that it had incorporated Donetsk and three other Ukrainian regions as part of its own territory, even though its forces did not fully control them – a move condemned as illegal by most countries at the United Nations.
Felix Light reports:
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