Donald Trump has said Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy have “gotta make a deal” to end the war between Russia and Ukraine.
The US president-elect said the conflict “has to stop” and that people were “dying at levels nobody has ever seen”.
He also claimed it could take “100 years” to rebuild Ukraine’s cities from the devastation of a full-scale Russian invasion that he said “should not” and “would not” have happened if he had been in office.
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It comes as President Putin claimed in a speech on Monday that the conflict was turning in his country’s favour after nearly three years of intense fighting, which has resulted in Russia occupying large swathes of Ukraine’s eastern territory.
President Zelenskyy has long been opposed to any peace deal with Mr Putin that leaves Moscow in control of Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia occupied in 2014.
However, speaking exclusively to Sky News last month, suggested a ceasefire deal could be struck if the territory he controls could be taken “under the NATO umbrella” – allowing him to negotiate the return of the rest later “in a diplomatic way”.
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‘It’s got to stop’
Mr Trump won a second White House term last month following a campaign in which he claimed he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in just “one day”.
On Monday, at a news conference at his Mar-a-Largo home in Florida, he repeated his desire to see an end to the fighting.
“Gotta make a deal,” Mr Trump said, before saying he would talk to Mr Putin and Mr Zelenskyy about bringing the conflict in Ukraine to an end.
He also said he had been shown pictures of body-strewn battlefields that reminded him of some of the grisly photographs from the 1861-1865 American Civil War.
“It’s got to stop,” he added.
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Zelenskyy on how ceasefire could work
Mr Trump did not give a direct answer when asked whether he believed Ukraine should cede territory to Russia as part of a negotiated settlement to end the war.
‘A turning point’
Earlier, Russia’s president made a speech at a defence meeting in which he suggested that a large number of men signing up for the country’s military voluntarily showed the tide of the Ukraine war was turning in Moscow’s favour.
“I would like to point out that the past year was a landmark year in achieving the goals of the special military operation [in Ukraine],” Mr Putin told top generals at the meeting in Moscow.
“Russian troops have a firm grip on the strategic initiative along the entire line of contact,” he said.
Around 427,000 troops signed army contracts this year, up from roughly 300,000 the year before, according to Russia’s defence ministry.
Speaking about this figure, Mr Putin said: “This flow of volunteers is not ending. And thanks to this… we are seeing a turning point on the frontline.”
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Russia has been making small gains into Ukrainian territory in recent months, reportedly at great human cost.
However, according to open source maps, Russian troops are now advancing at the fastest pace since the early days of its invasion in 2022.
