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Trump says he will ‘probably’ meet Putin this month, hits out at Ukraine
Al Jazeera
US president dismisses Kyiv’s complaints that it is being sidelined in talks to end the war in Ukraine.
United States President Donald Trump has said he will “probably” meet Russian President Vladimir Putin this month while launching a broadside effectively accusing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of being to blame for Moscow’s invasion.
Addressing reporters after US and Russian officials met for their first round of talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, Trump dismissed complaints that Kyiv had been denied a seat at negotiations to bring an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it’s going very well. But today, I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it…,” Trump said at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine.”
Trump said that he was “much more confident” of reaching an agreement following the talks in Riyadh led by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.