Russia Refuses To Commit to One-on-One Meeting With Zelensky as White House Assails the Press for Not Celebrating the Negotiations

Following a meeting of European leaders at the White House on Monday, President Vladimir Putin is not yet committing to a private meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky, which President Trump is demanding, as Mr. Trump and his staff are growing increasingly unhappy that the American press is not being sufficiently laudatory of the negotiations. Seated at a table in the East Room alongside the heads of NATO and the European Commission as well as several prime ministers, presidents, and other heads of government, Mr. Trump said he wanted to see the Russians and Ukrainians sit down before he joins direct talks. Caught on a hot mic speaking to the president of France, Mr. Trump said he believed Mr. Putin was ready to make a deal “for him.”“I think he wants to make a deal for me, you understand, as crazy as it sounds,” Mr. Trump told President Emmanuel Macron. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said Monday that Mr. Putin had committed to a meeting with the Ukrainians, though the Kremlin has yet to make any such announcements. She says that Mr. Trump’s national security team is trying to help set up the meeting between Messrs. Putin and Zelensky. “Both leaders have expressed a willingness to sit down with each other, and so our national security team will help both countries do that,” she said. According to the Moscow Times, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said Tuesday that they were neither ruling out nor committing to a one-on-one meeting with Mr. Zelensky. “We’re not refusing any kind of work format, neither bilateral nor trilateral. [Mr. Putin] has said that repeatedly,” Mr. Lavrov said in an interview, though he warned that they would have to take this “step by step, gradually, starting from the expert level and then going through all the necessary stages.”According to Agence France-Presse, the Kremlin offered on Monday to host meetings at Moscow, though Mr. Zelensky turned that offer down immediately. A top aide to Mr. Putin, Yuri Ushakov, told Russian reporters in a vague statement that it is “worth considering the possibility” of a private meeting with Mr. Zelensky. During an interview with “Fox and Friends” on Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump said he believed he and Mr. Putin were getting along well enough, at this point, to continue discussions about peace. “There’s a warmth there,” Mr. Trump said of the Russian president. “There’s a decent feeling, and it’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”At the top of her press briefing for reporters at the White House on Tuesday, Ms. Leavitt took more than five minutes to assail members of the press corps for not being adequately laudatory of the president’s attempts at peace. “This is why Americans’ trust in the mass media is at [its] lowest point in more than five decades. Diplomacy is a delicate process, and instead of reporting the facts about what is happening … many outlets in this room continue to try to actively undermine the president and sabotage the efforts toward peace,” Ms. Leavitt told reporters at the briefing on Tuesday. When asked by a reporter from the New York Times about why Mr. Trump did not have Mr. Putin call into the meeting yesterday with the European leaders, Ms. Leavitt shot back: “Only a reporter from the New York Times would ask a question like that.”Ms. Leavitt says Mr. Trump has “definitively stated” that American military forces will not be on the ground in Ukraine, but rather the United States would help with the “coordination” of security guarantees. “The president continues to have these conversations with both leaders,” Ms. Leavitt said. “Both sides are going to have to walk away a little bit unhappy.”

Russia Refuses To Commit to One-on-One Meeting With Zelensky as White House Assails the Press for Not Celebrating the Negotiations

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