President Donald Trump of the United States said Moscow and Kyiv want to settle the war in Ukraine and that Russian President Vladimir Putin was more inclined towards peace after the recent fall in the price of oil.
Trump said this while addressing reporters in the Oval Office on Monday.
“I think Russia with the price of oil right now, oil has gone down, we are in a good position to settle, they want to settle. Ukraine wants to settle,”; he said.
The price of oil, which drives the Russian economy, is reported to have fallen around $15 a barrel since the start of the year.
“We’ve come a long way, and, it could be something will happen, but hopefully it will,”; Trump added.
Recall that Putin ordered many Russian troops into Ukraine in February 2022, sparking Europe’s biggest ground conflict since World War Two and the largest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the depths of the Cold War.
Scores of soldiers have been killed or injured and Trump has repeatedly said he wants to end the “bloodbath”; that his administration casts as a proxy war between the United States and Russia.
Trump explained that Putin had proposed a three-day ceasefire to mark the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Soviet Union and its allies over Nazi Germany in World War Two.
“As you know, President Putin just announced a three-day ceasefire – which doesn’t sound like much but it’s a lot if you knew where we started from. This is a war that should never have happened,”; he said.
According to the US president, the number of those killed in the war was far higher than reported by most media organisations.
Meanwhile, neither side in the war published up to date casualty figures.
The Kremlin, asked on Monday about a possible meeting between Trump and Putin in Saudi Arabia, said that a meeting was necessary but that Putin had no trips to the Middle East planned for mid-May. Trump has said he plans to visit Saudi Arabia as early as May.
The US and Ukraine have signed a deal to give the United States preferential access to new Ukrainian minerals deals and fund investment in Ukraine’s reconstruction.
