Negotiators working to end the Russia-Ukraine war have already discussed “dividing up certain assets,” US President Donald Trump said Sunday as he announced he planned to speak to Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Tuesday.
Trump’s comments come after he announced last week that Ukraine had accepted a US-proposed 30-day ceasefire, putting the ball in Russia’s court as to whether it would accept his proposal to swiftly end the war.
“We’re doing pretty well, I think, with Russia. We’ll see if we have something to announce maybe by Tuesday, I’ll be speaking to President Putin on Tuesday,” he told reporters on board Air Force One during a flight back to the White House after his weekend at Mar-a-Lago.
“A lot of work’s been done over the weekend, we want to see if we can bring that war to an end,” he said. “Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.”
Trump said negotiators had already pinpointed certain topics up for discussion.
“We’ll be talking about land. A lot of land is a lot different than it was before the war, as you know. We’ll be talking about land, we’ll be talking about power plants, that’s a big question,” he added.
“But I think we have a lot of it already discussed, very much, by both sides, Ukraine and Russia. We’re already talking about that – dividing up certain assets.”
Putin’s response so far to the Trump-backed ceasefire proposal has been ambiguous. He said that Moscow agreed with the proposal in theory. But he also set out tough conditions and demanded concessions from Kyiv, and repeated his claim that the current Ukrainian government was part of the “root cause” of the war.
Meetings between American negotiators with representatives from Ukraine and Russia will continue this week. The Kremlin also said last week that US negotiators would travel to Russia for further talks, though it did not share details on the participants.
Russia first started seizing parts of Ukraine in 2014 before launching its full invasion in 2022, triggering the largest land conflict in Europe since World War Two. Since the 2022 invasion, Ukraine has lost control of about 11% of its land, according to CNN analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based conflict monitor.
Land concessions are among the most sensitive issues left to hammer out. American officials have said Ukraine will likely need to cede territory for the war to end, and Putin has made it a condition of entering into a ceasefire.
But conceding territory has long been a nonstarter for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and some European leaders have voiced concern about appearing to reward Putin for launching his invasion. Russia has also made clear it has no desire to give up the swathes of Ukrainian territory it has occupied.
Trump’s willingness to grant Moscow concessions even before talks began and his embrace of Putin have also rattled NATO allies in Europe who are now openly questioning whether decades of US security guarantees towards the continent can be relied upon.
Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff told CNN on Sunday that the ongoing talks over Ukraine were productive, but didn’t say how the matter of territorial concessions would be resolved.
Putin “accepts the philosophy of President Trump” in wanting to see the war come to an end, Witkoff said. He described his meeting last week with Putin as a “solution-based discussion,” and voiced confidence that a pause in fighting could arrive within weeks.
Putin also said Friday that his country is working at restoring relations with the US, after they were “practically reduced to zero, destroyed by the previous American administration.”
“Overall, the situation is starting to move,” he said, referring to relations with the Trump administration. “Let’s see what comes out of this.”
