Trump ‘surrendering to the Russians’ on Ukraine, top Democrat says

A senior Democratic lawmaker accused Donald Trump of “surrendering to the Russians” on Sunday, as Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff said talks between the US and Russia over Ukraine was “the only way to end the carnage”.

In an interview on ABC News’ This Week, Democratic senator Jack Reed, a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, hit out at Trump’s recent verbal attacks on Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and increased alignment with Russia.

“Essentially, this is President Trump surrendering to the Russians,” Reed said. “This is not a statesman or a diplomat. This is just someone who admires Putin, does not believe in the struggle of the Ukrainians and is committed to cozying up to an autocrat.”

But senior administration officials sought to side-step accusations that Trump’s re-positioning of US policies on Ukraine, including a possible deal for Ukraine to repay US military and financial support with rare-earth materials, amounted to a capitulation to the Russian position on the war.

Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the mideast who revealed this week that he had “spent a lot of time with President Putin”, during a recent trip to Moscow, “talking, developing a friendship, a relationship with him”, declined to blame Russia for starting war in Ukraine, calling Ukraine’s ambitions to join Nato “a threat to the Russians”.

“The war didn’t need to happen – it was provoked. It doesn’t necessarily mean it was provoked by the Russians,” Witkoff said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.

“There were all kinds of conversations back then about Ukraine joining Nato”, he said. “That didn’t need to happen. It basically became a threat to the Russians and so we have to deal with that fact.”

Witkoff’s remarks come days after he, along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz, held talks in Saudi Arabia with Russian officials over re-establishing diplomatic relations and a Russia-Ukraine peace deal.

Ukrainian officials said they were not invited to the meeting, and later said they would not accept a peace deal imposed on them. But Ukraine’s position later appeared to shift after Trump called Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections” who “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left”.

On Sunday, Zelenskyy said he wanted Trump to be a close partner to Ukraine, not just a mediator between two superpowers, the US and Russia, and would be willing to step down, if it would secure lasting peace for his country.

“If, to achieve peace, you really need me to give up my post, I’m ready. I can exchange it for Nato [membership]”, he said. “I don’t plan to stay in power for decades” he added. “But we won’t let Putin stay in power over Ukrainian territories either.”

That came as President Putin appointed the chief of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, as a special envoy on international economic and investment cooperation with western nations “including the United States of America”. Dmitriev, considered the most US-savvy member of Russia’s elite, was part of the Russian delegation that met with US counterparts in Riyadh.

Nato membership for Ukraine has all-but been ruled out by the US negotiators. The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, confirmed to Fox News Sunday that no US troops would be part of any future peace-keeping force in Ukraine and dodged the question over responsibility for starting the bloody three-year conflict.

“Does all the finger-pointing and pearl clutching make peace more likely? That’s the enduring question the president is asking. He wants peace, and if that’s the case, you’ve got to stare down the Russians, and Vladimir Putin, and who they’ve chosen to negotiate and have earnest conversations about difficult things,” Hegseth told his former colleague Shannon Bream.

“Standing here and saying, ‘You’re good, you’re bad; you’re a dictator, you’re not a dictator; you invaded, you didn’t’, it’s not useful, it’s not productive. So President Trump isn’t getting drawn into that in unnecessary ways and as a result, we’re closer to peace than ever before,” Hegseth added.

The White House continued its pushback against claims that it has pivoted to Russia’s position on the war. “President Trump’s peace through strength America First diplomacy effectively deterred Russia in his first term, and this war would have never started if he had never left office,” said the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt in an email to the Wall Street Journal.

Leavitt said Trump was “actively pressing both sides to end this brutal conflict once and for all”.