European leaders set to join call with Zelenskyy and Trump on Wednesday, Germany says - as it happpened.
Trump also expressed frustration with Ukrainian president and pushed for a Zelenskyy-Putin meeting during press conference.
Trump hopes for constructive 'feel out' meeting with Putin, but says 'not up to me to make deal'
Speaking in the White House in the last few minutes, US president Donald Trump has claimed his meeting with Putin will “a feel out meeting,” but he thought that the Russian president “wants to get it over with.”
“I’m going in to speak to Vladimir Putin, and I’m going to be telling him, you have got to end this war, you got to end it.”
He says he hopes for “a constructive” conversation with the Russian president, and says he will call the European leaders to debrief them on the chat shortly after leaving the room.
“Then after that meeting, immediately, maybe as I’m flying out, maybe as I’m leaving the room, I I’ll be calling the European leaders who I get along with very well. And you know, I have a great relationship, I think, with all of them, and I get along with Zelensky, but, you know, I disagree with what he’s done, very, very severely disagree. This is a war that should have never happened … but I’ll be speaking to Zelensky. The next meeting will be with Zelensky and Putin, or Zelensky, and Putin to me I’ll be there if they need me.”
He expressed some frustration with Zelenskyy again, saying:
“I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelensky was saying, Well, I have to get constitutional approval. I mean, he’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap?
Because there’ll be some land swapping going on. I know that through Russia and through conversations with everybody to the good for the good of Ukraine, good stuff, not bad stuff, also some bad stuff for both. So it’s good and there’s bad, but it’s very complex, because you have lines that are very uneven. And there’ll be some swapping, there’ll
