DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he wanted to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin as soon as possible to secure an end to the war with Ukraine and expressed a desire to work towards cutting nuclear arms.
In the run-up to his Nov. 5 election victory, Trump declared many times that he would have a deal in place between Ukraine and Russia on his first day in office, if not before. His advisers now concede the war will take months to resolve.
“I really would like to be able to meet with President Putin soon to get that war ended,” Trump, who returned to the White House on Monday, told the World Economic Forum in Davos via video link.
“And that’s not from the standpoint of economy or anything else. It’s from the standpoint of millions of lives are being wasted … It’s a carnage. And we really have to stop that war.”
Speaking at the White House later in the day, Trump told reporters he was ready to meet with Putin as soon as possible to end what he called a ridiculous war.
“From what I hear, Putin would like to see me, and we’ll leave as soon as we can. I’d meet immediately,” Trump said. “Everyday we don’t meet, soldiers are being killed in the battlefield.”
Trump added that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had told him he was ready to make a deal to end the war.
Trump told participants in Davos that U.S. efforts to secure a peace settlement were now hopefully under way, but gave no details. Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Earlier this week, Trump threatened to impose “high levels” of sanctions on Russia and tariffs on imports from there if Moscow did not reach a settlement.
Trump also told the crowd on Thursday he wants to work towards cutting nuclear arms, adding that he thought Russia and China might support reducing their own weapons capabilities.
“We’d like to see denuclearization … and I will tell you President Putin really liked the idea of cutting way back on nuclear. And I think the rest of the world, we would have gotten them to follow, and China would have come along too,” Trump said.
Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons in his war against Ukraine. Putin has been modernizing his nuclear forces and rejected talks with Washington on replacing New START, the last U.S.-Russia arms limitation pact, when it expires on Feb. 5, 2026.
In November, U.S. officials said Putin remains within the limits set by the treaty despite his 2023 suspension of the pact that holds Russia and the United States to deploying 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads on 700 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarines and bombers.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, Echo Wang, Lananh Nguyen and Marwa Rashad, Nandita Bose, Andrea Shalal and David Ljunggren; Editing by Howard Goller)
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