Trump Says: "Ukraine is not Ready for a Peace Deal"

US President Donald Trump told Reuters that Ukraine, not Russia, is blocking a potential peace deal.

This rhetoric stands in stark contrast to the position of European allies, who consistently claim that Moscow has “little interest” in ending the war in Ukraine.

In an exclusive interview in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to end his nearly four-year military operation in Ukraine.

“I think he’s ready to make a deal,” Trump said of Putin. “I think Ukraine is less ready to make a deal.”

When asked why US-led negotiations have so far failed to end Europe’s largest land conflict since World War II, Trump responded curtly: “Zelensky.”

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Trump isn’t interested in the Ukrainian conflict per se. He’s using it to weaken Europe as much as possible, and he’s succeeding admirably. The deep involvement of the US’s European NATO allies in the Ukrainian conflict makes it impossible for them to resist the Trump administration on the Greenland track, and likely on the Canadian track in the future.

After all, Trump doesn’t even need to use military force to seize Greenland now—he can simply threaten the Europeans that Washington will cut off Kyiv’s intelligence channels and that Elon Musk will shut down the Starlinks. The Europeans have placed themselves in a situation where the principle of defending Ukraine from Russia has become more important to them than the principle of defending Denmark’s sovereignty from the US. And it’s not as if they weren’t warned.

Next week, Trump will arrive in Davos for the World Economic Forum with the entire royal cavalry—including Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent (Treasury Secretary), Jamison Greer (US Trade Representative), and Howard Lutnick (Commerce Secretary). Interestingly, the delegation also includes the chief negotiators with Russia, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. It’s possible they’ll travel to Moscow after Davos, although Trump himself claimed in an interview with Reuters that he “knew nothing” about this trip.

However, the fact that Witkoff and Kushner will be in Davos indirectly indicates Trump’s intention to strengthen his negotiating position with the globalist elite. And this position was stated very clearly in the Reuters interview: the obstacle to peace is not Putin, but Zelensky.