US President Donald Trump said on Monday that he does not think Ukraine can win the war against Russia, but added, “anything is possible”.
“They could still win it,” Trump said at the White House on Monday.
“I don’t think they will. They could still win it. I never said they would win it … you know war is a very strange thing.”
On Friday, Trump called on Kyiv and Moscow to freeze the battle lines and “stop where they are” in a bid to end Russia’s ongoing all-out war following a lengthy meeting in Washington with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The comments on Monday represent another shift in Trump’s position on the fighting.
After meeting with Zelenskyy in New York on the sidelines of the annual UN General Assembly last month, Trump even said he believed the Ukrainians could win back all the territory they had lost to Russia since Putin launched the full-scale invasion in 2022.
That was a dramatic shift for Trump, who on the 2024 campaign trail and for much of the early part of his second term as president, insisted that Kyiv would have to cede land lost to Russia to end the fighting.
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy said his reportedly tense meeting with Trump on Friday was “positive” even though he did not secure the Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine.
Zelenskyy said Trump reneged on the possibility of sending the long-range missiles to Ukraine, which would have been a major boost for Kyiv, following his phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin hours before the Ukrainian leader and US president were to meet on Friday.
“In my opinion, he does not want an escalation with the Russians until he meets with them,” Zelenskyy told reporters on Sunday in comments that were embargoed until Monday.
Ukraine is hoping to purchase 25 Patriot air defence systems from US firms using frozen Russian assets and assistance from partners, but Zelenskyy said procuring all of these would require time because of long production queues.
He said he spoke to Trump about help procuring these quicker, potentially from European partners.
According to Zelenskyy, Trump said during their meeting that Putin’s maximalist demands, that Ukraine cede the entirety of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, was unchanged.
Zelenskyy was diplomatic about his meeting with Trump despite reports that he faced pressure to accept Putin’s demands, a tactic he has kept up since the disastrous Oval Office spat in February when the Ukrainian president was scolded on live television for allegedly not being grateful enough for continued US support.
Zelenskyy said that because Trump ultimately supported a freeze along the current front line his overall message “is positive” for Ukraine.
He said Trump was looking to end the war and hopes his meeting in the coming weeks with Putin in Hungary will pave the way for a peace deal after their first summit in Alaska in August failed to reach such an outcome.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke by phone on Monday to discuss next steps toward ending the war, following conversations last week between presidents Trump, Zelenskyy and Putin.
Both ministries issued similar vague statements that the conversation built on understandings reached by Trump and Putin in their 16 October call.
After that, Trump reiterated that he expected to meet with Putin soon and that Rubio would meet a high-level Russian delegation, presumably led by Lavrov, this week.
Neither the US or Russian statements mentioned when either of those meetings might happen or where.
The Russian statement described Rubio-Lavrov call as “constructive” while the US statement said that Rubio had “emphasised the importance of upcoming engagements as an opportunity for Moscow and Washington to collaborate on advancing a durable resolution of the Russia-Ukraine war.”
