Trump wants to meet Putin soon ‘to end the war’; Nato chief urges US to keep supplying arms to Kyiv

Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Thursday urged the US to keep supplying Ukraine with weapons to fight Russia’s invasion and said he was sure Europe was ready to pay the bill.

Kyiv’s talks with its allies on a possible foreign troop contingent in Ukraine that would act as a security guarantee were in their early stages and had not focused on specific numbers, said the foreign ministry on Thursday.

Trump says he wants to meet Putin soon to ensure end of Ukraine war

US President Donald Trump said on Thursday he wanted to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin soon to secure an end to the almost three-year-old war with Ukraine, lamenting what he called the huge loss of life.

In the run-up to his 5 November election victory, Trump declared dozens of times that he would have a deal in place between Ukraine and Russia on his first day in office, if not before. His advisers now concede the war will take months to resolve.

“I really would like to be able to meet with President Putin soon to get that war ended,” Trump, who returned to the White House on Monday, told the World Economic Forum in Davos by video link.

“And that’s not from the standpoint of economy or anything else. It’s from the standpoint of millions of lives are being wasted. It’s a carnage. And we really have to stop that war.”

Trump also said US efforts to secure a peace settlement were now hopefully under way, but gave no details.

Europe will pay for US arms for Ukraine, says Nato chief

Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte on Thursday urged the US to keep supplying Ukraine with weapons to fight Russia’s invasion and said he was sure Europe was ready to pay the bill.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Nato chief said Europe must invest more in defence, ramp up arms production and take a bigger share of spending on Ukraine aid.

His comments came after Trump said earlier this week that the European Union should be doing more to support Ukraine.

“On Ukraine, we need the US also to stay involved,” said Rutte.

“If this new Trump administration is willing to keep on supplying Ukraine from its defence industrial base, the bill will be paid by the Europeans, I’m absolutely convinced of this, we have to be willing to do that.”

He said Trump was right to say Europe should be paying more to help Ukraine win the war as “it is a worldwide conflict, yes, but still Ukraine is closer to Europe than to the US.”

Asked to elaborate on his comments, Rutte told Reuters in Davos that if the US kept supplying arms to Ukraine, “then it is only fair that Europe will, in terms of the financial burden of those deliveries, pay the highest burden”.

He did not put a figure on how much Europe would pay or say whether he had agreement from European leaders on the matter.

Kyiv says it’s too soon to talk about foreign troop numbers in Ukraine

Kyiv’s talks with its allies on a possible foreign troop contingent in Ukraine that would act as a security guarantee were in their early stages and had not focused on specific numbers, said the foreign ministry on Thursday.

Ukraine is seeking security guarantees from its allies as part of any potential peace deal to end the war, nearly three years since Russia’s invasion. President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday those could include at least 200,000 European peacekeepers.

In a later interview with Bloomberg, he clarified that number would depend on the size of Ukraine’s military, which he has said Kyiv does not want to cut as a part of any deal. The armed forces currently number around 800,000 personnel.

“Yes, the discussion is ongoing about ... the military contingents of foreign powers, foreign nations that can be potentially deployed to Ukraine,” foreign ministry spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi told reporters at a briefing in Kyiv.

“This discussion is in its very early stages.”

He said it was “too early to talk about exact numbers”, and that a foreign troop contingent would only be one part of broader security guarantees.

“We think that durable, reliable security guarantees for Ukraine must include both Europe and the United States. This is how we can ensure that this peace is sustainable and durable,” said Tykhyi.

Russia on Thursday rejected the idea of Nato countries sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire in the war with Russia, saying such a move would threaten to cause an “uncontrollable escalation”.

Trump’s threats against Moscow come under fire in Russia

“Disrespectful”, “insulting” and “ill-informed”. Trump’s threats aimed at strong-arming Moscow into ending its war in Ukraine have been badly received by some politicians and nationalists in Russia who say his tactics bode ill for a deal.

Trump said on Wednesday he would probably impose new sanctions, taxes and tariffs on Russia, whose economy he said was failing, and on Moscow’s allies, unless President Vladimir Putin struck a deal with him “soon” to end the conflict.

In an apparent attempt to balance his threat with a compliment, Trump spoke of the need to never forget that Russia had helped the US win World War Two and incorrectly stated that the then Soviet Union had lost 60 million people in that conflict, as opposed to the 26.6 million people estimated by the Russian authorities.

Putin and Trump have yet to speak by phone since his inauguration and, with ties with the new administration at an early stage, the Kremlin played down Trump’s threat, saying it “did not see any particularly new elements here”.

“We carefully record all the nuances. We remain ready for dialogue, President Putin has repeatedly spoken about this — for equal dialogue, for mutually respectful dialogue,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

Peskov took issue though with Trump’s statement on World War Two, saying it was the Soviet Union which had made the biggest contribution to victory over Nazi Germany. He also pointed out Trump’s mistake on the number of war dead.

Influential war bloggers, read by millions of Russians and licenced by the authorities, expressed outrage.

One of them, Voenkor Kotonok, said Trump’s statement was “insulting, arrogant and self-satisfied”. Another, war correspondent Alexander Kots, speculated that the Middle East ceasefire had given Trump a misplaced sense of omnipotence.

Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser, said Trump’s actions so far suggested he would not be able to bring peace to Ukraine, while Vladimir Solovyov, a high-profile state media talk show host, said Trump’s threats proved he was an enemy.

“Is that any way to talk to great Russia?,”{ an angry Solovyov told his listeners.

Ukraine says Trump’s sanctions threat sends ‘strong signal’ to Russia

Ukraine praised Trump on Thursday for threatening to impose tariffs and sanctions on Russia if it refuses to make a deal to end the war in Ukraine and said the comment sent a “strong signal”.

“We do really welcome such strong messages from President Trump and we believe that he will be the winner. And we believe that we have an additional chance to get new dynamic in diplomatic efforts to end this war,” said Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, at a discussion panel in Davos, Switzerland.

Kyiv has long urged its allies to impose tougher sanctions on Russia to raise the costs of the war for Moscow and to discourage it from undertaking any further aggression.

Russian man jailed for 17 years for passing information to US

A Russian man was jailed for 17 years after being found guilty of passing classified information to a representative of a US intelligence agency, the Tass state news agency reported on Thursday.

“The Moscow City Court found Dmitry Arkadyevich Shatresov ... guilty of committing high treason in favour of the United States,” Tass cited Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) as saying.

“It was established that Shatresov D.A., having obtained by illegal methods information which constituted state secrets, [and] guided by criminal intent, intended to transfer it to a representative of American intelligence."

Tass reported that 40-year-old Shatresov, who was sentenced on Wednesday, lived in a city just outside the Russian capital and worked in logistics. DM