President Donald Trump on Monday said Ukraine’s president could visit Washington in the next few weeks to sign a deal granting America significant concessions in terms of his country’s mineral wealth as repayment for the support provided by the U.S. during the war that started with Russia’s invasion exactly three years earlier.
Sitting in the Oval Office alongside French president Emmanuel Macron, Trump said representatives from Washington and Kyiv were “very close to a final deal” and told reporters he’d be soon meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian leader with whom he’s had a contentious relationship dating back to his first term in the White House.
“He may come in this week or next week to sign the agreement …which would be nice, I’d love to meet him,” Trump said.
The president added that the agreement would be “a deal with rare earths and various other things” before telling reporters that Zelensky “would like to come” to Washington to sign the agreement before submitting it for ratification by his country’s parliament.
Additionally, Trump told the assembled press in the Oval Office that his understanding was that Russian president Vladimir Putin would not object to European peacekeepers being deployed in Ukraine as part of an agreement to end the three-year-old war that he started without provocation in an attempt to redraw his country’s borders to encompass territory that was lost with the fall of the Soviet Union.
“I’ve specifically asked him that question. He has no problem with it,” Trump said.
For his part, Macron said Europe “stands ready to support Ukraine in various ways, supporting its military, and we don’t want to preempt any sort of discussions that are currently underway” and stressed that both France and the U.S. share “the same objective” of “building a lasting peace.”
Trump’s comments came just hours after he and Macron participated in a call with their fellow Group of Seven leaders to commemorate the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump repeated his oft-stated claim that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine had he been in office rather than Joe Biden in 2022, and said each of the G7 leaders “expressed their goal of seeing the War end.”
He also said the mineral deal that is being negotiated with Kyiv would be an “economic partnership” between the two countries that would “ensure the American people recoup the Tens of Billions of Dollars and Military Equipment sent to Ukraine, while also helping Ukraine’s economy grow as this Brutal and Savage War comes to an end.”
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