Russian President Vladimir Putin told the president of the United States, Donald Trump, in a telephone call on Thursday that Moscow wants a negotiated end for the Ukraine War, but does not go back to its original objectives, said a Kremlin assistant.
In a wide conversation that also covered Iran and the Middle East, Trump “again raised the issue of an early end of military action” in Ukraine, Yuri Ushakov’s assistant told reporters.
“Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, said we are still looking for a political and negotiated solution to the conflict,” said Ushakov.
Putin informed Trump about the implementation of agreements reached between Russia and Ukraine last month to exchange prisoners of war and dead soldiers, said Ushakov, and told him that Moscow was ready to continue negotiations with kyiv.
“Our president also said that Russia will achieve the objectives that he has established: that is, the elimination of the well -known root causes that led to the current state of things, to the current acute confrontation, and Russia will not retreat from these objectives,” he added.
There was nothing in the Kremlin reading that suggested that Putin had made any change in the Moscow position during the conversation with Trump, who assumed the position with the promise of ending the war quickly, but has expressed frequent frustration with the lack of progress between both sides.
The “root causes” phrase is the abbreviation for the Kremlin argument that he was forced to go to war in Ukraine to prevent the country from joining NATO and the use of the Western Alliance as a launch platform to attack Russia.
Ukraine and his European allies say it is a misleading pretext for what they call an imperial style war, but Trump in the previous public comments has shown sympathy with Moscow’s refusal to accept the NATO membership for Ukraine.
Putin and Trump did not talk about the United States’s decision to stop some critical arms shipments to Ukraine, said Ushakov.
In Iran, he said, “the Russian side emphasized the importance of solving all disputes, disagreements and conflict situations exclusively by political and diplomatic means.”
Last month, Trump sent us to the stealth bombers to attack three Iranian nuclear sites, to a measure convicted by Moscow as not caused and illegal.
