President Trump Tuesday joked about scoring a ticket to heaven by brokering an elusive peace deal in Ukraine after a high-stakes summit meeting with European allies at the White House.
A day after the extraordinary gathering of leaders claimed some modest progress toward talks with Russia, Trump predicted the pearly gates would swing wide open for him if he can achieve a breakthrough to end the 3-1/2 year-long war.
“If I can save 7,000 people a week from being killed, I think that’s pretty (good),” he told Fox News. “I want to try to get to heaven if possible.”
Trump wryly conceded that so far he’s fallen short of what might be required to gain favor with St. Peter.
“I’m hearing that I’m not doing well,” he said. “I am really at the bottom of the totem pole.”
Trump suggested he still has a tricky path ahead to arrange a face-to-face meeting between Putin and Ukraine President Zelenskyy, noting that both men need to make concessions.
“I hope President Putin is going to be good and if he’s not, that’s going to be a rough situation,” he said. “And I hope that Zelensky, President Zelensky, will do what he has to do. He has to show some flexibility.”
Russia poured cold water on the idea of a summit in the near future, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying such a sit-down would take a significant amount of time to organize, repeating a familiar pattern of stalling.
European leaders left the summit with Trump feeling cautiously optimistic that they limited the damage from the American president’s summit with Putin, after which Trump adopted Kremlin talking points about the conflict.
They claimed significant progress in coming up with concrete Western “security guarantees” for Ukraine that could be included in a potential peace agreement.
But they failed to get Trump to revert to his previous stance of demanding an immediate ceasefire, which Putin rejects, meaning the fighting and Russian’s aerial attacks on Ukraine civilians is unlikely to end anytime soon.
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