From the Independent / Yahoo!News:
"Trump says Russia has made ‘pretty big concession’ to peace by not seizing whole of Ukraine
President Donald Trump on Thursday said Russia’s failure to forcibly seize and occupy the entirety of Ukraine’s territory amounts to a “pretty big concession” to Kyiv as he continues to push for Russia and Ukraine to come to a settlement to end the war Moscow started three years ago.
Speaking in the Oval Office during a bilateral meeting with Norwegian prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Trump insisted to reporters that he is putting pressure on Russian president Vladimir Putin behind the scenes as reporters asked him what he would ask the Russian leader to give up to match the massive territorial concessions he has asked Ukraine to make as a way to find an end to Europe’s bloodiest conflict since the end of the Second World War.
Trump replied: “Stopping the war, stopping [from] taking the whole country.”He added that not seizing all of Ukraine’s sovereign land — the goal Putin had laid out when he launched the war in February 2022 and which was foiled by Ukraine’s military resistance — was a “pretty big concession” in his view.
Trump’s bizarre and nonsensical comment glossed over the fact that Putin had always wanted to occupy and control Ukraine’s land and erase it from the map as an independent nation, thereby reassembling a large portion of the former Soviet Union and Russian empire. The reason Russia has not succeeded in that aim isn’t because Moscow has magnanimously declined to carry out an occupation, but because Ukrainian forces have kept Russian troops from advancing through most of the country...
Trump, who appeared upset about Zelensky refusing to recognize Russia’s theft of his country’s territory as part of a Trump-brokered peace deal where Russia would end the war in exchange for having their wartime gains legitimized, said Crimea “was lost years ago” to Ukraine and said it was “not even a point of discussion” in a separate Truth Social post.
Trump also taunted Zelensky in the same post, writing that Zelensky had “no cards to play” and accusing him of making it “so difficult to settle this war.”
“He has nothing to boast about! The situation for Ukraine is dire — He can have Peace or he can fight for another three years before losing the whole country,” he said.
Trump, who has had a rocky history with Zelensky dating back to his attempt to blackmail the Ukrainian leader into announcing sham investigations into then-former vice president Joe Biden and his son ahead of the 2020 presidential election, has repeatedly — and falsely — accused Zelensky of having started the war while pressuring him to make broad concessions and asking nothing of the sort from Putin.
He, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have threatened to “walk away” from efforts to broker a settlement between Moscow and Kyiv over what they describe as Zelensky’s intransigence, even though it is Russia that has repeatedly broken previously announced ceasefire agreements... Vance again suggested that the U.S. would abandon the process unless Kyiv agreed to massive territorial concessions of a scope not seen since the 1938 Munich agreement that legitimized Nazi Germany’s annexation of part of what was then Czechoslovakia..."
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