President Trump granted a 30-minute interview to Fox News reporter Sean Hannity following his Aug. 15 meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, broadcast at 9:00 p.m. When Fox asked him to measure the meeting from 1 to 10, Trump said that as for the meeting, “it was a 10.” He reiterated that there were some issues of importance not concluded, but that both he and Putin “want to see it get done,” referring to ending the killing in Ukraine, where “7,000 lives are lost every week.”
Of particular note, Trump seemed to confirm that major points of agreement involved territory and non-NATO security measures. Hannity posed: “There’s going to be some land swaps, there will be more Russian territory than there had been, and what Ukraine needs desperately are security measures that won’t be NATO-related.” He then asked Trump to confirm if that was correct, to which Donald Trump replied in the affirmative: “Those are points that we negotiated and those are points that we largely have agreed on, actually…. We’re pretty close to a deal. Now look, Ukraine has to agree to it, maybe they’ll say ‘no.’”
He did not reveal any more details about the content of the agreement reached thus far, and saying that “as far as I’m concerned, there’s no deal until there’s a deal.” He noted, however, that “we did make a lot of progress.” Trump said it is now “up to President Zelenskyy to get it done and maybe the European nations, they have to get involved a little bit.”
The President said that he would be open to attending a trilateral meeting with the Presidents of Ukraine and Russia, saying: “If they’d like, I’ll be at that meeting. They’re going to set up a meeting now between President Zelenskyy and President Putin and myself, I guess, not that I want to be there, but I want to get it done.” He added, “I’ll be there.”
Trump said that “it is up to Zelenskyy to get it done,” and that his advice to Zelenskyy after the Aug. 15 meeting with Putin would be to “make a deal.”
