By Jacki Thrapp
President Donald Trump said on Oct 25 that he doesn’t plan to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin until a peace deal with Ukraine is reached.
“I’m going to have to know that we’re going to make a deal,” Trump said while speaking to journalists on Air Force One at a pitstop on his way to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for a week-long Asia tour.
“I’m not going to be wasting my time. I’ve always had a very great relationship with Vladimir Putin, but this has been very disappointing.”
On Oct. 21, Trump called off a potential summit with Putin in Budapest, Hungary, because he only wants to meet if it will push forward his administration’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
The cancellation announcement happened two months after their meeting in Alaska failed to produce a peace deal.
“I thought this would have gone long before peace in the Middle East,” Trump said. “We have Azerbaijan and Armenia—that was very tough. In fact, Putin told me on the phone, he said, ‘Boy, that was amazing,’ because everybody tried to get that done and they couldn’t. I got it done. You had others. If you look at India and Pakistan. I could say almost any one of the deals that I’ve already done I thought would have been more difficult than Russia and Ukraine, but it didn’t work out that way. There’s a lot of hatred between the two, between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Putin.”
On Oct. 22, the Trump administration announced stricter sanctions on Russia, which impacted the country’s two largest oil companies, due to “Russia’s lack of serious commitment to a peace process to end the war in Ukraine,” according to a press release by the Treasury Department.
Trump suggested he might bring up China’s purchases of Russian oil when he meets with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping for a wide-ranging meeting set for the last day of his Asia trip on Oct. 30, in Busan, South Korea.
“I may be discussing it,” Trump said.
“You probably saw today, China is cutting back very substantially on the purchase of Russian oil, and India is cutting back completely. And we’ve done sanctions.”
The commander in chief added that he hopes to get a “complete deal” that takes care of American farmers and stops fentanyl, originating in China, from arriving on U.S. soil.
Trump is expected to kick off the first full day of his Asia trip in Malaysia, where he’s set to have meetings with Prime Minister of Malaysia Anwar Ibrahim, Prime Minister of Cambodia Hun Manet, and Prime Minister of Thailand Anutin Charnvirakul on Oct. 26.
