Kyiv, Dec 8: Donald Trump on Sunday called for an immediate cease-fire in Russia’s war with Ukraine and the president-elect renewed warnings that he was open to pulling the United States out of NATO.
Trump made his cease-fire proposal after a weekend meeting in Paris with French and Ukrainian leaders, claiming in a social media post that Kyiv “would like to make a deal” to end the more than 1,000-day war.
The Kremlin responded that it was open to negotiations, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy cautioned that any deal would have to pave the way to a lasting peace.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said Russia and Ukraine have each lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in a war that “should never have started.” “There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin. Too many lives are being needlessly wasted, too many families destroyed,” Trump said. He urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to act to bring an end to the fighting.
Trump’s remarks came after the meeting Saturday with Zelenskyy and French President Emmanuel Macron that Zelenskyy described as “constructive.”
Separately, Trump in an NBC News interview that aired Sunday renewed his warning to NATO allies that he did not see continued US participation in the Western military alliance as a given during his second term in office.
Trump has long complained that European and the Canadian governments in the mutual-defence bloc are freeloading on military spending by the US, by far the most powerful partner in NATO. (AP)
