US President Donald Trump is temporarily walking away from hosing a bilateral meeting between Russian and Ukrainian leaders to end the war, local media reported on Thursday, citing unnamed administration officials familiar with the matter.
Trump believes that arranging the meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russian leader Vladimir Putin is the next stage for ending over the three-year-war. Trump said this week that he was going to host a trilateral meeting with the two leaders after they met first, without revealing the timing of the encounter.
Trump is now stepping back from his efforts to mediate the peace process. Trump’s hesitation over hosting the meeting comes after he acknowledged on Wednesday that ending the Russia-Ukraine war was more difficult than expected. Moscow has also played down the prospected meeting between Zelenskiy and Putting, stating that there was no need to rush with it. Trump is also apparently discouraged by the Kremlin’s refusal to agree to NATO-style security guarantees for Ukraine. Russia’s hard-liner Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a press conference on Thursday that European troops’ deployment to Ukraine would amount to “foreign interference”.
