Trump praises Zelensky ahead of the White House conversations

The president of the United States, Donald Trump, said he has a “great respect” for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, on the eve of his conversations in the White House.

When the BBC asked him if he would apologize for recently calling him a “dictator,” he said he couldn’t believe he had said this. He also called Zelensky “very brave.”

Trump spoke after conversations with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Sir Keir Starmer, about the end of the war between Ukraine and Russia.

He predicted a “very good meeting” with Zelensky on Friday, saying that the efforts to achieve peace “advanced quite quickly.”

This week’s meetings occur after the Trump administration shocked its western partners by maintaining the first high -level conversations in the United States with Moscow since Russia invaded Ukraine a little more than three years ago.

The new president of the United States seemed to blame Zelensky for war and rebuked him for not starting peace conversations before.

“You’ve been there for three years,” he said last Tuesday. “You should have finished it … you should never have started it. You could have made a deal.”

But this Thursday, speaking after meeting Sir Keir, Trump told journalists that they asked about their next conversations with Zelensky: “I think we are going to have a very good meeting tomorrow morning. We are going to get along.”

When asked about Chris Mason of the BBC if he still thought that Zelensky was a “dictator,” he replied: “I said that? I can’t believe I said that.”

Zelensky will hope to win some type of security guarantee for his country that would support any peace agreement that can be negotiated.

When asked about this on Thursday, Trump only said he was “open to many things”, but that he wanted Russia and Ukraine to agree an agreement before deciding what measures could be established to enforce it.

On his Friday visit, Zelensky is expected to sign an agreement that gives access to the United States to rare mineral resources in Ukraine.

Trump suggested that the presence of US mining concerns in Ukraine would act as a deterrent against future Russian attacks against Ukraine.

“It’s a support, one could say,” he said Thursday. “I don’t think anyone is going to play if we are there with many workers and have to do with rare earths and other things we need for our country.”

The British prime minister had said that the United Kingdom was prepared to send troops to Ukraine after the war as part of a peace maintenance force, but only if the United States, the main member of NATO, provided a “backup.”

When asked if the United States would help British peace forces if they were attacked by Russia, Trump said: “The British have incredible soldiers, incredible military and can take care of themselves. But if they need help, I will always be with the British, okay?”

Article 5 of NATO maintains that NATO members will come in defense of an ally that is attacked.

Praising Trump’s “personal commitment to bring La Paz” in Ukraine, Sir Keir said the United Kingdom was “ready to put boots on the ground and airplanes in the air to support an agreement.”

“Now we are focused on ending the Barbara War in Ukraine,” he said.

But, he added, it should not be a peace agreement “that rewards the aggressor or encourages regimes as Iran.”

When asked if Vladimir Putin was reliable, the United Kingdom Prime Minister said his opinions about the Russian president were well known.

When asked why he seemed to trust Putin and Sir Keir, Trump said: “I know that many people would say that there is no possibility that they ever deceive him, and that they are the worst people of the world.”

“I know others that would guarantee that they would deceive you, and you know what, they are 100% honorable, so you never know what you are getting.”

The head of EU Foreign Policy, Kaja Kallas, who had to meet with the Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington before canceling the conversations “due to programming problems,” he told BBC News that Putin and Russia “did not want to have peace.”

“For any peace agreement to function, the Europeans already use the Ukrainians on board,” he added.

When stopping in the Irish Republic on Thursday on the way to the United States, Zelensky met Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Micheál Martin at Shannon airport.

“We discuss the steps to end the war with guaranteed peace for Ukraine and all of Europe,” he said later.

After the overthrow of the Ukrainian President of Ukraine in 2014, Moscow attached the Peninsula of the Black Sea of ​​Crimea and supported the pro-ruse separatists in bloody struggles in eastern Ukraine.

The conflict broke out in the total war when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of people, most of them soldiers, have been killed or injured, and millions of Ukrainian civilians have fled as refugees.

In addition to Crimea, Russia now occupies parts of four other regions: Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

The Kremlin warned Thursday that Russia would not make territorial concessions to Ukraine as part of a peace agreement.

“All the territories that have become subjects of the Russian Federation … They are an integral part of our country, Russia,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “This is an absolutely indisputable fact and a non -negotiable fact.”

Separately, Russian and American officials met in the Turkish city of Istanbul for Conversations about the reconstruction of diplomatic ties.

The two nuclear superpowers expelled the staff from the other’s embassy when Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, was in the White House.