President Trump will discuss dividing up “assets” between Ukraine and Russia during a Tuesday call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he told reporters late Sunday.
The 47th president said he and Putin would discuss terms both Ukraine and Russia seek in ending the war.
“We’ll be talking about land. We’ll be talking about power plants,” Trump said, referencing the Zaporizhzhia power plant along the front lines that Russians have occupied since March 2022.
President Trump speaks to reporters, watched by national security adviser Mike Waltz, aboard Air Force One on his return to Washington, DC, on March 16, 2025. REUTERS
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro via video link at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow, Russia, on March 14, 2025. via REUTERS“I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides, Ukraine and Russia. We’re already talking about that, dividing up certain assets.”
Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff on Thursday met with the Kremlin, offering Putin a chance to sign a Trump-proposed unconditional and immediate cease-fire with Ukraine, which the Russian president did not do.
That plan called for a cease-fire to come immediately, after which discussions on terms for an end to the war could happen.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said peace negotiations “involve a lot of hard work, concessions from both Russia and Ukraine,” and that it would be difficult to even begin those negotiations “as long as they’re shooting at each other.”
While Trump’s plan aimed to “stop the fighting” before talks on eventual peace negotiation terms began, Moscow has been trying to pressure the president into opening up those deliberations before agreeing to a cease-fire — which Ukraine already signed off on.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks during a briefing in Kyiv, Ukraine, on March 15, 2025. AP“Russia continues to seize on diplomatic engagements with the United States to normalize its war demands,” according to the latest analysis by the Institute for the Study of War.
Since the Kremlin’s rejection, Moscow has kept tight-lipped about its conversations with Witkoff, which the ISW suggested indicates Russia’s desire to bury the meeting that apparently didn’t go its way.
In a Saturday readout of a call between Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Moscow made no mention of the recent Witkoff discussion despite highlighting their meeting more than a week before in Riyadh that largely went its way.
A Russian “Grad” self-propelled multiple rocket launcher fires toward Ukrainian positions near Chasiv Yar, Donetsk region, Ukraine, on March 15, 2025. AP
Firefighters quickly extinguished a fire after a strike on Odessa. @dsns/Telegram“[T]he Kremlin is seizing specifically on the Riyadh meeting as part of ongoing narrative efforts to portray the United States and Russia as in complete agreement on how to settle the war in Ukraine and to draw attention away from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent rejection of the US-Ukrainian ceasefire proposal,” the ISW said in its analysis.
However, the White House has yet to abandon its commitment to achieving Trump’s cease-fire, and Trump on Monday said “a lot of work’s been done over the weekend.”
“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One. “Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.”
