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Ukraine’s president is lobbying Trump to provide Tomahawk missiles to help in the war against Russia
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Volodymyr Zelensky has urged Donald Trump to provide Ukraine with potentially game-changing US Tomahawk missiles during their meeting in the White House tonight.
But the US president has warned doing so could leave to “a bigger escalation” in a conflict that is months away from its fourth anniversary.
The Ukrainian leader is in Washington DC for a high-stakes meeting to strengthen US support for Kyiv, eight months after he was hounded out at a disastrous Oval Office summit in February.
Zelensky has asked the US president for long-range Tomahawk missiles capable of striking deep into Russia. Trump had seemed open to the idea in the lead-up to the summit and on Friday Zelensky mooted the idea of an ‘exchange’ for Ukrainian drones.
But a call from Vladimir Putin with Trump Thursday may have have convinced the American leader to hold back his arsenal ahead of their next summit.
Addressing questions from the press Friday, Trump said there was “a lot of bad blood” between Putin and Zelensky but he still believes he can convince the Russian leader to end the war.
Top White House officials told a reporter, “Your mom,” when asked who picked the location for president Donald Trump’s upcoming meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Trump announced Thursday that he will soon meet with Putin in Budapest, Hungary, to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine. The choice has raised questions, because Putin is wanted by the International Criminal Court. However, Hungary appears unlikely to cooperate with the warrant and is in the process of leaving the court, the Associated Press reports.
When HuffPost asked the White House who chose the location for the meeting, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt replied, “Your mom did.” White House communications director Steven Cheung also followed up with, “Your mom,” the outlet reports.
Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian president Vladimir Putin was avoiding meeting him because of personal hatred.
“It’s not a secret, president Trump said that Putin hates me,” Zelensky said, speaking to reporters outside the White House.
Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, cast fresh doubt on Russia’s battlefield assessment, saying on Friday that Moscow’s plans to seize major centres “are not being implemented and are constantly subject to revision and postponement”.
Russian president Vladimir Putin said this month that Moscow’s troops held the initiative throughout the front line, estimated by Syrskyi to stretch over 1,250km.
“We can state that Ukrainian servicemen stopped the enemy’s spring-summer offensive campaign and continue to destroy the Kremlin’s further plans,” Syrskyi wrote on the General Staff’s Facebook page.
Ukrainian officials rejected reports from the Russian defence ministry claiming capture of three villages.
The ministry said yesterday its forces had taken control of one more village in the Dnipropetrovsk region and two in the northeastern Kharkiv region, closer to the Russian border.
The Ukrainian military noted fighting around at least two of the settlements but made no acknowledgement that any of them had changed hands.
According to the Russian ministry, Moscow’s troops took control of Pryvillia in the Dnipropetrovsk region where they had established a foothold in recent weeks.
Also captured were the villages of Pishchane, near the virtually destroyed town of Kupiansk that Russia sees as a target in its drive westward, and Tykhe, just inside the border with Russia.
The General Staff of Ukraine’s military, in an evening report, said Pishchane was one of several villages where Russian forces had been trying to advance.
The report said six of seven attacks in the area had been repelled.
The comments from Donald Trump yesterday calling on Kyiv and Moscow to “stop where they are” and end their brutal war amount to another shift in his position on the Ukraine war.
Trump’s tone on the war shifted after he held a lengthy phone call with Vladimir Putin on Thursday and announced that he planned to meet with the Russian leader in Budapest, Hungary, in the coming weeks.
In recent weeks, he had shown growing impatience with Putin and expressed greater openness to helping Ukraine win the war.
After meeting with Zelensky in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly last month, Trump even said he believed the Ukrainians could win back all the the territory they had lost to Russia since the February 2022 invasion.
That was a dramatic shift for Trump, who had previously insisted that Kyiv would have to concede land lost to Russia to end the war.
When president Donald Trump announced plans for yet another sit-down with Russian president Vladimir Putin following a Thursday phone call between the two leaders, it looked like yet another sign that Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky was in for a rough ride when he visited the White House Friday.
Just eight months ago, the Ukrainian president and his delegation were unceremoniously ushered out of the West Wing after an unprecedented Oval Office shouting match that included scolding the wartime leader on his choice of clothing and his supposed ingratitude for the billions Washington has provided in defence aid and financial assistance since Russian troops invaded his country three years earlier.
Andrew Feinberg writes:
President Donald Trump has called on Kyiv and Moscow to “stop where they are” and end their brutal war following a lengthy White House meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump’s frustration with the conflict has surfaced repeatedly in the nine months since he returned to office, but with his latest comments he edged back in the direction of pressing Ukraine to give up on retaking land it has lost to Russia.
“Enough blood has been shed, with property lines being defined by War and Guts,” Trump said in a Truth Social post not long after hosting Zelensky and his team for more than two hours of talks.
“They should stop where they are. Let both claim Victory, let History decide!”
Later, soon after arriving in Florida, where he’s spending the weekend, Trump urged both sides to “stop the war immediately” and implied that Moscow keep territory it’s taken from Kyiv.
“You go by the battle line wherever it is — otherwise it’s too complicated,” Trump told reporters.
“You stop at the battle line and both sides should go home, go to their families, stop the killing, and that should be it.”
Putin’s talks move was meant to make the US transfer of such weapons less likely, said Max Bergmann, a Russia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“It does seem that Putin’s outreach is perhaps designed to thwart the potential transfer of Tomahawks to Ukraine, so Putin is wanting to put that back in the box,” Bergmann said. “It strikes me as sort of a stalling tactic.”
Mykola Bielieskov, a senior analyst at Come Back Alive, a Ukrainian non-governmental organization that is a major procurer of military equipment for the Ukrainian armed forces, said Tomahawk missiles would level a playing field that is tipped toward Russia, but that they would not be a silver bullet.
“We don’t expect Russia to crumble after one, two or three successful strikes,” Bielieskov said. “But it’s about pressure, constant pressure. It’s about disrupting the military-industrial complex.”
Since taking office in January, Trump has regularly threatened action against Russia, only to delay those steps after talks with Putin.
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