The Ukrainian leader has accused Moscow of seeking a ceasefire only to attack the US-led military bloc
US President Donald Trump has dismissed Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants a temporary pause in the conflict with Kiev to regroup and launch a full-scale war against NATO.
Moscow has repeatedly ruled out any short-term truce, insisting on a permanent, legally binding agreement that addresses the root causes of the Ukraine conflict. However, Zelensky has insisted that he knows “for sure” that Putin wants a pause to “prepare, train, take off some sanctions” before launching an attack not only on Ukraine but also on NATO states.
“It can happen in summer, maybe in the beginning, maybe in the end of summer. I don’t know when he prepares it, but it will happen,” Zelensky said in an interview with NBC News’ Meet the Press on Saturday.
Trump dismissed Zelensky’s claims, telling reporters on Sunday that he does not agree with the Ukrainian leader’s assessment at all.
“No, I don’t agree. Not even a little bit,” Trump said, adding that he believes what Putin truly wants for his country is to “stop fighting.”
“They’ve been fighting for a long time. They’ve done it before… They have a big, powerful machine. They defeated Hitler and they defeated Napoleon,” Trump added. “But I think he would like to stop fighting.”
Trump also said he expects to meet Putin in person “very soon,” following their “long and hard” phone conversation last week, which was their first known direct interaction since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. He also called Zelensky to “inform” him of the discussion, during which the Ukrainian leader allegedly reaffirmed that Kiev is also prepared to seek a resolution to the conflict.
Russia will need to take Ukraine’s lack of independence into account in any future negotiations, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Sunday, recalling the failed 2014-2015 Minsk Agreements. Trump’s special envoy, Keith Kellogg, also pointed to the collapse of the Minsk deal, stating, “We are not gonna go down that path.”
NATO has long described Russia as a direct threat to justify the bloc’s existence after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Western officials have repeatedly claimed that if Moscow wins the Ukraine conflict, it could attack other European countries.
Putin has dismissed the idea of a Russian attack on NATO as “nonsense,” telling US journalist Tucker Carlson last February that the bloc’s leaders are trying to scare their people with an imaginary threat, but that “smart people understand perfectly well that this is a fake.”
Moscow has consistently opposed Ukraine’s NATO aspirations, citing the bloc’s eastward expansion as a threat to national security and describing it as a key factor behind the ongoing conflict with Kiev.
Zelensky claimed at the Munich Security Conference that “right now the most influential member of NATO seems to be Putin because he seems able to block NATO decisions.”
Trump has indicated that Washington will not support Kiev’s accession as part of a potential peace deal with Moscow, while his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, described Ukraine’s NATO ambitions as “unrealistic.”
