Russian President Vladimir Putin says some proposals in a US plan to end the war in Ukraine are unacceptable to the Kremlin, indicating in comments published Thursday that any deal is still some ways off.
US President Donald Trump has set in motion the most intense diplomatic push to stop the fighting since Russia launched the full-scale invasion of its neighbor nearly four years ago. But the effort has once again run into demands that are hard to reconcile, especially over whether Ukraine must give up land to Russia and how it can be kept safe from any future aggression by Moscow.
Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and son-in-law Jared Kushner planned to meet later Thursday with the Ukrainian delegation led by Rustem Umerov following the Americans’ discussions with Putin at the Kremlin, but there was no immediate confirmation whether that meeting took place.
The meeting at the Shell Bay Club, a golf property developed by Witkoff in Hallandale Beach, was tentatively set to begin at 5 p.m. EST, according to an official familiar with the logistics. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly because the meeting has not yet been formally announced and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Putin said his five-hour talks Tuesday with Witkoff and Kushner were “necessary” and “useful,” but also “difficult work,” and some proposals were unacceptable.
Speaking to the India Today television channel before he landed Thursday in New Delhi for a state visit, Putin said the American proposals discussed at the Kremlin meeting were based on earlier discussions between Russia and the US, including his meeting with Trump in Alaska in August, but also included new elements.
“We had to go through practically every point, which is why it took so much time,” he said. “It was a meaningful, highly specific and substantive conversation. Sometimes we said, ‘Yes, we can discuss this, but with that one we cannot agree.’“
Trump said Wednesday that Witkoff and Kushner came away from the marathon session confident that Putin wants to find an end to the war. “Their impression was very strongly that he’d like to make a deal,” he added.
Putin said the initial US 28-point peace proposal was trimmed to 27 points and split into four packages. He refused to elaborate on what Russia could accept or reject, and none of the other officials involved offered details of the talks.
The Russian leader praised Trump’s peace efforts, noting that “achieving consensus among conflicting parties is no easy task.”
“To say now what exactly doesn’t suit us or where we could possibly agree seems premature, since it might disrupt the very mode of operation that President Trump is trying to establish,” Putin said.
He emphasized that Russia will fulfill the goals it set and take all of the eastern Donetsk region. “All this boils down to one thing: Either we take back these territories by force, or eventually Ukrainian troops withdraw,” he said.
European leaders, left on the sidelines by Washington as US officials engage directly with Moscow and Kyiv, have accused Putin of feigning interest in Trump’s peace drive.
French President Emmanuel Macron met in Beijing with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, seeking to involve him in pressuring Russia toward a ceasefire. Xi, whose country has provided strong diplomatic support for Putin, did not say respond to France’s call, but said that “China supports all efforts that work toward peace.”
Russian barrages of civilian areas of Ukraine continued overnight into Thursday. A missile struck Kryvyi Rih on Wednesday night, wounding six people, including a 3-year-old girl, according to city administration head Oleksandr Vilkul.
The attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown damaged more than 40 residential buildings, a school and domestic gas pipes, Vilkul said.
A 6-year-old girl died in the southern city of Kherson after Russian artillery shelling wounded her the previous day, regional military administration chief Oleksandr Prokudin wrote on Telegram.
The Kherson Thermal Power Plant, which provides heat for over 40,000 residents, shut down Thursday after Russia pounded it with drones and artillery for several days, he said.
Authorities planned emergency meetings to find alternate sources of heating, he said. Until then, tents were erected across the city where residents could warm up and charge electronic devices.
Russia also struck Odesa with drones, wounding six people, while civilian and energy infrastructure was damaged, said Oleh Kiper, head of the regional military administration.
Overall, Russia fired two ballistic missiles and 138 drones at Ukraine overnight, officials said.
Meanwhile, in the Russia-occupied part of the Kherson region, two men were killed by a Ukrainian drone strike on their vehicle Thursday, Moscow-installed regional leader Vladimir Saldo said. A 68-year-old woman was also wounded in the attack, he said.
Putin says there are points he can’t agree to in the US proposal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine
https://arab.news/z6fgz
Putin says there are points he can’t agree to in the US proposal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine
- He emphasized that Russia will fulfill the goals it set and take all of the eastern Donetsk region
- “All this boils down to one thing: Either we take back these territories by force, or eventually Ukrainian troops withdraw,” he said
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
