Kremlin says someone needs to force Zelenskiy to make peace after clash with Trump

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MOSCOW (Reuters) – The Kremlin said on Monday that someone needed to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to make peace after a clash with U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office that showed just how hard it would be to find a way to end the war.

“What happened at the White House on Friday, of course, demonstrated how difficult it will be to reach a settlement trajectory around Ukraine,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “The Kyiv regime and Zelenskiy do not want peace. They want the war to continue.”

“It is very important that someone forces Zelenskiy himself to change his position,” Peskov said. “Someone has to make Zelenskiy want peace. If the Europeans can do it, they should be honoured and praised.”

President Vladimir Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in 2022, triggering the biggest confrontation between Russia and the West since the depths of the Cold War.

The conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014 after a pro-Russian president was toppled in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and Russia annexed Crimea, with Russian-backed separatist forces fighting Ukraine’s armed forces.

President Vladimir Putin, Peskov said, was familiar with the “unprecedented event” in the Oval Office – which showed, Peskov said, Zelenskiy’s lack of diplomatic abilities at the very least.

“In addition, we see that the collective West has partially begun to lose its collectivity, and a fragmentation of the collective West has begun,” Peskov said.

(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov and Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Andrew Osborn)