President Donald Trump on Wednesday appeared confident that he will manage to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine, even though he has so far failed to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin to end his brutal war.
In a phone interview with CBS News, Trump said he expected to make progress toward his said goal of ending the three-year war but suggested that Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “are not ready yet.”
“I’ve been watching it, I’ve been seeing it, and I’ve been talking about it with President Putin and President Zelenskyy,” Trump said. “Something is going to happen, but they are not ready yet. But something is going to happen. We are going to get it done.”
Trump, once again, conceded that he underestimated how hard it would be to bring that conflict to a close, but said: “I think we’re going to get it all straightened out.”
Following his meeting with Putin in Alaska on Aug. 15, where he rolled out the red carpet for the Russian dictator and rode with him in “the Beast,” the U.S. president’s armored limousine, Trump had claimed peace talks, including a potential trilateral summit between him and the two foreign leaders, would soon follow. Yet, those talks haven’t materialized and Putin has seemed unwilling to make any concessions to Kyiv, while continuing to escalate his attacks on Ukrainian civilians.
