US President Donald Trump has virtually called off his peacemaking efforts with Ukraine and Russia to break their ongoing conflict after his two-hour tete a tete with self claimed buddy Russian President Vladimir Putin ended in a no entry zone. Now the Vatican has entered the scene to host the peace talks between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders.
One does not know if President Trump asked the Chicago born Pope Leo XIV for help to bail him out and host the talks so that both leaders would listen to him. But Vice President of US J.D. Vance indeed meet the new pope from Chicago Leo XIV and explained the global situation including Ukraine.
Trump spoke with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other leaders in separate calls Monday, in an attempt to stop the “bloodbath” of the war in Ukraine, media reports indicated.
But the president’s peace initiative ended inconclusive leaving him frustrated. Russia and Ukraine would now hold direct talks on a ceasefire “immediately,” Trump said afterward in a post on his social network Truth Social.
However, it was unclear what form those talks would take or when they would happen. The Vatican, Trump said, has expressed interest in hosting the negotiations. “The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of,” he said.
Trump’s call with Putin lasted more than two hours and “was very informative and very open,” Putin told Russian state media.
Trump said little about his conversation with Zelenskyy, with whom he spoke first, other than to say that he had informed Zelenskyy and the leaders of other NATO countries of the negotiations. White House officials declined to offer any further details.
Trump spoke with Zelenskyy twice on Monday, according to Zelenskyy, once one-on-one, before Trump’s call with Putin, and again during a conference call with the Ukrainian and NATO leaders.
“I reaffirmed to President Trump that Ukraine is ready for a full and unconditional ceasefire,” Zelenskyy tweeted. “If the Russians are not ready to stop the killings, there must be stronger sanctions,” he wrote. “Pressure on Russia will push it toward real peace — this is obvious to everyone around the world.”
In a Monday interview with NBC News in Rome, where he was received by Pope Leo XIV, Vice President JD Vance said, “We talked about a couple of what I would call the president’s major peace initiatives with the Pope. We talked a lot about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza. We talked a lot about the Russia-Ukraine situation. It’s hard to predict the future, but I do think that, not just the Pope, but the entire Vatican, has expressed a desire to be, you know, really helpful, and to work together on facilitating, hopefully, a peace deal coming together.
Can’t predict the future, but that was very meaningful, and I think will hopefully bear fruit for the country.”
Meanwhile, Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said before the call that Russia “highly values” and is “grateful to the American side.” In a briefing with journalists, he said that if the U.S. can “help to achieve our goals through peaceful means, then this is indeed preferable.”
Peskov was also asked about the chance of Trump and Putin meeting in person, a possibility the American president floated on Friday. “It will largely depend on what they themselves decide,” Peskov said. The meeting “needs to be worked out” by the two leaders in terms of dates and other details, he said.
Ahead of the much anticipated Trump-Putin call, leaders from Britain, France, Germany and Italy said they spoke on Sunday with Trump. The British government said in a statement that it was urging “Putin to take peace talks seriously.”
Those leaders “also discussed the use of sanctions if Russia failed to engage seriously in a ceasefire and peace talks,” the statement said — something Trump has previously threatened.
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