By Anjali Sharma
WASHINGTON – President elect Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he would speak to the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky and that of Russia Vladimir Putin to end the “carnage” of three years of war, as the Kremlin leader lauded Russian army successes on the ground.
Both sides have rushed to gain an advantage on the battlefield ahead of Trump entering the White House in January and there has been some alarm in Ukraine that it will be forced to make territorial concessions in exchange for peace.
Trump has been highly critical of billions of dollars of aid that Joe Biden’s administration provided to Kyiv to battle Moscow’s invasion.
He spoke at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida as Putin hailed his army’s accelerating advance in Ukraine in what he called a “landmark” year.
“We’ll be talking to President Putin, and we’ll be talking to the representatives, Zelensky and representatives from Ukraine,” Trump said.
“We gotta stop this carnage,” he added, referred to the war.
Trump has claimed he could swiftly end the conflict but has not provided concrete details on how.
He called for an “immediate ceasefire” earlier this month and said “negotiations should begin”.
Trump met Zelensky in a meeting hosted by French leader Emmanuel Macron in Paris this month, after which the Ukrainian leader said he had argued that Kyiv is seeking an “enduring” peace and “security guarantees”.
Poland urged that Kyiv should not be “forced” into peace talks, with its Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski stated that it was “the aggressor and not the victim should be encouraged and forced” to do so.
Putin addressed top military generals in an end-of-year meeting, struck a defiant and optimistic tone claimed his troops had the upper hand across the entire front line.
The comments came with Russia’s army advancing across eastern Ukraine at their fastest pace since the first weeks of the offensive.
“Russian troops are firmly holding the strategic initiative along the entire line of contact,” Putin said.
He said Russia’s army had seized 189 Ukrainian settlements this year and called 2024 a “landmark year in the achievement of the goals of the special military operation”, using Moscow’s official language for its campaign.
Russian Defence Minister Andrei Belousov said Russia’s troops had seized a total of almost 4,500 square km (1,737 square miles) of Ukrainian territory in this year and were now gaining around 30 square km a day.
Russia’s army said that it had captured another small village in the Donetsk region as part of its latest advance.
Putin has been accused by Kyiv and the West of escalating the nearly three-year conflict in recent weeks.
Over 10 countries and the EU called North Korea’s growing involvement the conflict a “dangerous expansion” of the fighting “with serious consequences for European and Indo-Pacific security”.
The Foreign Ministers of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Britain, the United States and the high representative of the European Union signed the release.
Ukraine said it had killed or wounded at least 30 North Korean troops fighting alongside Russia’s soldiers in the Kursk border region, where Kyiv is mounting an offensive.
The US, South Korea and Ukraine have accused North Korea of sending more than 10,000 soldiers to support Russia.
Putin defended Russia’s vast defence and security spending on the conflict, amid mounting economic uncertainty at home.
Military spending has surpassed six per cent of GDP, while overall defence and security outlays are almost nine per cent.
“It is not, strangely enough, the biggest expenditure in the world, even among countries that do not have any armed conflict,” Putin, an ex-KGB spy in power for the last quarter of a century, said.
“Nevertheless, it is a lot of money, and here we need to use it very rationally,” he added.
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