President Donald Trump has called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiate an end to the nearly three-year-old war Russia launched against Ukraine, threatening to impose further sanctions on Moscow if the Russian leader does not agree.
In a statement posted to his Truth Social platform, Trump said he is “not seeking to hurt Russia” and expressed “love” for the Russian people while boasting of his “very good relationship” with Putin – who in 2016 ordered, what the Justice Department called a “pervasive and systematic” effort to interfere in the presidential election on Trump’s behalf.
Trump also noted that the former Soviet Union lost 60 million people when it allied against Nazi Germany and with the United States and Britain during World War II.
“All that being said, I will do Russia, whose economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR. Make up your mind now and STOP this ridiculous war! IT WILL ONLY GET WORSE,” Trump said.
The president added a threat that if a “deal” was not reached “soon,” he would have “no choice but to impose high levels of taxes, tariffs and sanctions on everything sold by Russia to the United States and various other participating countries.”
Trump added: “Let’s get this war that would never have started if I was president over! We can do it the easy way or the hard way – and the easy way is always better. It’s time to “MAKE A DEAL”. NO MORE LIVES MUST BE LOST!!!”
Trump has long promised that he would end the war in Ukraine when he returned to the White House. He often said he would end it on his first day, but the war is on. So far, the US has provided more than $65 billion in military aid to Ukraine since 2022.
It is unclear which, if any, Russian goods would be subject to Trump’s tariffs, as a series of increasingly restrictive sanctions levied by the Biden administration in concert with dozens of other countries have crippled Russia’s economy and cut Moscow off from much of the international banking and financial system.
A series of sanctions imposed by Joe Biden earlier this month targeted Russia’s energy sector. They included two major Russian oil producers and exporters – Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftegas – both of which are involved in liquefied natural gas exports and efforts to expand the Russian energy sector into the Arctic.
Trump has not spoken to Putin since he was sworn in on Monday, although the two leaders reportedly spoke during the transition period after last year’s presidential election.
But the newly minted 47th president said he and his aides are working to arrange a conversation.
On Monday, he told reporters that Putin “can’t be excited” about how the war is going and said Russia is “not doing so well” against Kyiv’s forces.
“I mean, he’s grinding it out, but most people thought the war would be over in a week, and now we’re three years in. So he can’t be excited, [it’s] don’t make him look very good,” Trump said, before adding that about 1 million Russian soldiers and 700,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died during the war.
Trump also said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had told him he wants to “make a deal” to end the war.
“Zelensky wants to make a deal. I don’t know if Putin does… He should make a deal. I think he’s destroying Russia by not making a deal,” he said.
Responding to Trump’s threat, Russia’s deputy UN ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy said Moscow would have to see what Trump’s definition of a “deal” would look like before coming to the negotiating table.
“It’s not just a question of ending the war – it’s first and foremost a question of solving the root causes of the Ukrainian crisis,” he said. “So we have to see what the ‘deal’ means in President Trump’s understanding.
“He is not responsible for what the US has done in Ukraine since 2014, making it ‘anti-Russia’ and preparing for war with us, but it is in his power now to stop this malicious policy,” Polyanskiy added.
Zelensky, for his part, told attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday that a sit-down between him and Trump was on the way.
“The teams have been working on a meeting; they are currently in the process,” he said.
“We are your partner. We know all the sore points; we have lost our people, – we want to end the war this year,” he continued, adding that Ukrainians want an end to the three-year-old conflict “not just quickly, but fair and above all reliable for us.
The Ukrainian leader last met with Trump last September in New York, while Trump was in the middle of his presidential campaign against then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
At the time, Zelensky said he believed he and Trump shared a “common position that the war must be stopped and that Putin cannot win.”
Trump later told Fox News that he had “learned a lot” from the sit-down, saying that both he and Zelensky “want to see this end” and “want to see a fair deal done.”