I thought it might be easier to negotiate with Zelenskyj. So far, it has been more difficult, adds Trump in connection with a press conference.
He adds that it's still okay and says in the next breath that Ukraine can also be on board.
I believe we have an agreement with both. I hope they do it, says Trump.
Favorable for Russia
Earlier on Wednesday evening, US Vice President JD Vance confirmed media reports that the US is proposing an agreement that is very favorable to Russia, where Ukraine is expected to give up most of the area currently under Russian occupation.
But Zelenskyj has rejected a legal recognition of the occupied Crimean Peninsula as Russian, since the Ukrainian territory was annexed by Russia in violation of international law in 2014.
There's nothing to talk about. This goes against our constitution, said Zelenskyj at a press conference in Kyiv on Tuesday, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Trump: Prolonging the Killing
Trump called Zelenskyj's stance "inflammatory" because it "makes it difficult to end the war".
Zelenskyj responded by posting a picture on X of an American declaration from 2018 that rejects the Russian annexation of Crimea. Trump's then-Foreign Minister Mike Pompeo urges Russia to follow the fundamental principle of respecting other countries' territorial integrity.
To reporters at the White House, Donald Trump says that Zelenskyj's refusal to accept the US terms for ending the conflict will only "prolong the killing on the battlefield".
Moscow's Demands: No NATO
Trump says nothing about what the potential agreement with Russia would entail.
But in an interview with the French newspaper Le Point earlier on Wednesday, the Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesperson Dmitrij Peskov outlined Moscow's demands for a ceasefire. Among other things, Ukraine must abandon its ambitions to join NATO and the military support from the West to the country must cease, according to Peskov.
He also demands that Ukraine withdraw from the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Cherson, and Zaporizjzja, which Russia only partially occupies, and that the entire regions be recognized as Russian.
If Ukraine lays down its arms and withdraws from these regions, military operations will stop immediately, says Peskov to Le Point, reports Kyiv Independent.
Russia already backed paramilitary forces that took control of large parts of the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Russian forces entered the Ukrainian Crimean Peninsula the same year, before the country illegally annexed it.
When the large-scale war began in February 2022, Russian forces entered and took control of an area along the entire land border, as well as a corridor where they approached the capital Kyiv.
Russia took control of the city of Mariupol in the south after a long and bloody siege, creating a land corridor of occupied territory that stretched to Crimea.
Ukraine's military struck back and pushed back the invasion forces entirely in the north. In the autumn of the same year, Ukraine took back the entire region of Charkiv in the northeast and a large part of Cherson in the south in successful counter-offensives.
Since then, the front line has only shifted marginally: Russia has advanced with small steps in the east, and both countries have made incursions across the border in the northeast. In the summer of 2024, Ukraine launched a surprise counter-offensive into Russian Kursk and took over an area there. In the spring of 2025, they lost almost the entire area.
