Trump renews call to replace Zelensky as Ukraine negotiator

President Donald Trump said Monday he would be willing to join Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping for a meeting focused on denuclearization, a day after The Wall Street Journal reported Putin had proposed the trilateral gathering for next month.

Trump told reporters he would participate in such a meeting, “not so much for Ukraine, because Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine, they haven’t been doing much—and the same thing with China.” Instead, he said, “we would have it to talk about nuclear weapons and denuclearization.” Trump called such a meeting “a very positive thing for the world” and said it would likely be held in China.

Trump is already scheduled to travel to China next month for a meeting of countries in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, which would be his second visit to China in his second term.

The Journal reported Sunday that Putin proposed a meeting among Trump, Putin and Xi to talk about Ukraine in an attempt to negotiate an end to the four-year conflict on terms that, the Journal reported, would favor Moscow.

Trump’s relationship with Putin has come into sharp focus over the past few weeks, after he announced a diesel-supply deal with Russia as he faced scrutiny at home over rising costs that slowed the American economy and hurt Republicans’ political prospects ahead of the midterm elections.

His relationship with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also become more strained. Trump on Monday reupped his calls to replace Zelensky as the country’s chief negotiator. “To be honest, I think it’s time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine,” Trump said, adding: “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine, they’ve given nothing to us, remember that.”

On Friday, Trump halted implementation of sanctions that were to be imposed on Russia under a bipartisan bill he signed last month, drawing criticism from lawmakers, including some of his allies and fellow Republicans.

Trump defended his Russia-related decisions over the weekend in a social-media post, saying he was in the process of “negotiating Peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine” and did not want to do anything that would “drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.” He has said his overarching goal is to stop the killing in a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the conflict has continued since.