‘Putin will reject Trump's first proposal’
Donald Trump has repeatedly said he could end the war in Ukraine in a day. How exactly he would do that, the future US president has not said. He will already be allowed to put his money where his mouth is at the start of 2025.
But Donald Trump may not be able to convince his Russian ‘friend’ Vladimir Putin of a peace deal with Ukraine without a fight. So predicts Konstantin Malofeev (50), a Russian oligarch and a Kremlin confidant.
‘To get constructive talks, we should not talk about the future of Ukraine, but about the future of Europe and the whole world,’ the Russian oligarch views the situation more globally, in an interview with British business newspaper “The Financial Times”.
Donald Trump chose 80-year-old former general Keith Kellogg as peace envoy for Ukraine and Russia last week. That man presented Trump with his plan to end the war between Ukraine and Russia earlier this year, and he managed to convince Trump. So he may go and try it on behalf of the Republican president.
‘He will come to Moscow with his plan and we will tell him that he can buzz off, because we don't like the proposal,’ Malofeev, influential banker, media tycoon and ally of Putin and the Kremlin, already dismisses initial US hopes.
According to the Russian billionaire, Trump will only be able to end the war if he reverses the recent US decision to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles against Russia. Another demand is for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to be sacked. And that is certainly not all: ‘And afterwards, he (Trump, ed.) must discuss all issues of world order at the highest level with Putin.’ By those ‘issues’, Malofeev means, among others, the unrest in the Middle East and the growing cooperation between Russia and China.
(SR for Tagtik/Source: The Financial Times/Illustration picture: Picture and copyright by Kremlin.ru via WikiCommons licensed under the creative commons attribution 4.0 license)