US President Donald Trump said he believes Vladimir Putin wants to make peace in Ukraine and will not “mess around” at their summit in Alaska.
“We’re gonna find out where everybody stands. And I’ll know within the first two minutes, three minutes, four minutes or five minutes… whether or not we’re going to have a good meeting or a bad one,” Trump told reporters.
“If it’s a bad meeting, it’ll end very quickly. If it’s a good meeting, we’re going to end up getting peace in the pretty near future,” he added.
Trump reiterated his long-held claim that Putin would not have launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 if he had been president, calling the war one that “should have never happened.”
“I think if I weren’t president, he would take over all of Ukraine,” Trump said. “But I am president, and he’s not going to mess around with me.”
Putin has attempted to seize all of Ukraine for over three years but has been unable to capture more than about one-fifth of its territory, at the cost of more than 1 million Russian casualties, according to Western defense assessments.
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