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President Donald Trump told reporters on Feb. 2 that talks with Russia are progressing. “We have meetings and talks scheduled with various parties, including Ukraine and Russia, and I think those discussions are actually going pretty well,” he said, reported RT.

Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, had claimed earlier that Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy was already considering changes to his stance on ruling out any formal territorial concessions. “Zelenskyy has already indicated he will soften his position on land,” he stated. At the same time, the envoy claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin “is going to have to soften his positions as well.” Speaking about the timeline for a possible resolution, Kellogg estimated that an agreement could be reached within months. “It’s not years we are talking about. We have a solid action plan,” he said.

Then yesterday, Trump said he wanted access to Ukraine’s rare earth mineral resources as a condition for continued U.S. support. He spoke of this to reporters in the Oval Office at the time of his signing of executive orders. He complained that the U.S. had sent more in military and economic assistance to Ukraine than its European partners, adding, “We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earth and other things.”

Trump suggested that he’s received word from the Ukrainian government that they’d be willing to make a deal to give the U.S. access to the elements critical to the modern high-tech economy. “I want to have security of rare earth,” Trump added. “We’re putting in hundreds of billions of dollars. They have great rare earth. And I want security of the rare earth, and they’re willing to do it.”

In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov refused to comment on Trump’s most recent statements. “We don’t have anything new to add to what we have already said on this issue,” Peskov said in response to a TASS question. “We don’t know yet what he means exactly, so it’s hard to form an opinion,” he added.

In response to recent U.S. statements about settling the conflict, Alexey Polishchuk, the Director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Second CIS Department, told TASS that the Trump Administration has yet to offer anything substantial. “They [the U.S.] speak frequently about it, but they haven’t officially proposed anything specific. It seems that we are witnessing attempts to test our positions and assess the contours of a potential peace deal,” he said. At the same time the U.S. is escalating the information background. “This is their specific negotiating style, which is typical for some spheres of business. First, they create artificial tension and unpredictability, and then offer de-escalation options in exchange for concessions and unilateral advantages,” the senior diplomat concluded.