WASHINGTON, May 13. /TASS/. US President Donald Trump insists that Moscow and Kiev should hold direct negotiations, Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff said, warning that Washington will otherwise walk away.
"The [US] president has issued an ultimatum to both sides that without those direct talks and if they don’t occur quickly, then he believes the United States ought to step back from this conflict whatever that means and just not be involved," Witkoff said in an interview with Breitbart News recorded on May 8. "This is something that we want to mediate. It’s not our war. We didn’t start the war, but we want to help to end it. The way that that happens is a ceasefire — everybody stops the violence, and we spend a bit of time together making sure we can deal with the major issues here and I think that we can," he emphasized.
According to Witkoff, if direct talks between Russia and Ukraine bring any result, there will be "a strong chance to getting an end to this conflict." Trump’s special envoy thinks that if the United States pulls back from the Ukraine conflict, "it’s bad for the Europeans, it’s bad for the Ukrainians," and, he added, "I don’t think it’s good for the Russians."
Earlier, Trump stated that his administration will abandon its push for a peace settlement in Ukraine it one of the two sides "makes it very difficult." Also, he warned that Washington would walk away from the negotiations to end the conflict if it finds that this is not doable.
Speaking to reporters in the Kremlin in the small hours of May 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin invited the Kiev authorities to resume the direct talks they broke off in 2022 without any preliminary conditions. He proposed to launch a dialogue on May 15 in Istanbul. The Russian leader recalled that Russia had declared ceasefires more than once but all of them, including the latest three-day V-Day truce, were violated by the Kiev regime.