https://newrepublic.com/post/204776/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-ceasefire-ukraine
Trump Accidentally Admits His Ukraine Peace Deal Is Crumbling
Donald Trump hasn’t gotten Vladimir Putin to agree to anything.
Russia has apparently not agreed to a ceasefire, according to Donald Trump.
The U.S. president told reporters Sunday that Ukraine’s near-term peace prospects with Russia did not include an end to the violence.
“Did [Russian President Vladimir] Putin agree to a ceasefire to allow a referendum to take place?” a journalist asked Trump Sunday evening during a Palm Beach press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
“Not a ceasefire, and that’s one of the points that we’re working on right now,” Trump said. “He feels that look, you know, they’re fighting and to stop—and then if they have to start again, which is a possibility, he doesn’t want to be in that position. I understand that position. The president feels strongly about that, or something.”
“You know you have to understand the other side,” Trump insisted, speaking of the Russian dictator while just steps away from Zelenskiy. “I’m on the side of peace, I’m on the side of stopping the war.”
The detail adds to a growing pile of evidence that Russia isn’t negotiating in good faith to end its assault on Ukraine. The hostile foreign power has offered virtually nothing—not even temporary peace—to resolve the nearly four-year conflict. Yet it has been gifted unprecedented capitulations from the Trump administration, upending longstanding U.S. policy in the process.
Last month, the Trump administration unveiled a 28-point peace plan that catered to some of Russia’s most outrageous demands, such as requiring Ukraine to swear off NATO membership and to hand Moscow Crimea and the eastern Donbas region.
Still, Ukraine is pushing toward a resolution. In the weeks since Trump unveiled his plan, Zelenskiy and his team have drafted their own version of a peace plan, which he told reporters Sunday was “90 percent agreed to,” noting that the U.S.-Ukraine security guarantees were “100 percent agreed” to.
The sensitive issue of ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia, however, was still up in the air.
“I would not say agreed, but we’re getting closer to an agreement on that, and that’s a big issue. Certainly, that’s one of the big issues, and … it’s unresolved,” Trump said Sunday.
More
than 13,300 civilians have been killed and 31,700 injured in Ukraine
since Russia invaded in February 2022, according to a United Nations report from June. Last week, Russia bombed Kyiv, devastating portions of Ukraine’s war-torn capital and killing at least one person while injuring 27.
Trump pledged on the campaign trail that he would end the war on his first day in office, but still the conflict has dragged on, in large part due to Moscow’s tireless and ever-shifting demands. On Sunday, Trump told reporters that he has “no deadline” to resolve the war.
By Monday morning, Russian officials suggested that Moscow’s position could change yet again as they accused Ukrainian forces of attempting to attack Putin’s residence in the Novgorod region.
Trump Casually Reveals U.S. “Knocked Out” a Facility in Venezuela
Here’s what we know about what happened.
President Trump is claiming to have successfully bombed a “big facility” in Venezuela in yet another act of aggression and sign of the administration’s interventionist goals in the region.
“We just knocked out—I don’t know if you read or you saw—they have a big plant, or a big facility, where the ships come from. Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So we hit them very hard,” Trump told GOP donor John Catsimatidis on his Friday radio show.
A staffer close to the situation later described the target as a “drug facility.” And while details remain virtually nonexistent (how do we know this even happened?), the attack does align with the administration’s unsubstantiated narrative that the Venezuelan government is directly supporting drug traffickers.
This is a major, violent escalation against Venezuela with absolutely zero explanation or justification to the American people. The so-called “peace president” has bombed ships full of fishermen, stolen an oil tanker, threatened Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with regime change, and even given the CIA the greenlight to meddle there.
The Venezuelan government has yet to respond.
Trump was later asked to shed more light on the apparent bombing while taking questions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday.
“Can you say anything more about the explosion in Venezuela that you mentioned in a radio interview?” a reporter asked. “Did the military do that?”
“Well it doesn’t matter, but there was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump replied. “They load the boats up with drugs. We hit all the boats, and now we hit the area.... It’s the implementation area, that’s where they implement … and that is no longer around.”
He also refused to confirm whether the attack was performed by the CIA, but said that he knew “exactly who it was” but didn’t “want to say who it was.”
This story has been updated.
