Trump’s new Ukraine stance is meant to pressure Putin, officials say, despite lack of sanctions or military aid

By Kevin Liptak, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump’s abrupt shift on the war in Ukraine this week came amid fresh frustration at Russian President Vladimir Putin, and was intended to apply more pressure on Moscow to come to the negotiating table, according to US officials.

By publicly declaring Ukraine could regain all its territory — a position few NATO leaders share, at least without a dramatic shift in the battlefield dynamics — Trump hopes to jumpstart the process of getting the two sides to a peace deal, the officials said.

Whether Trump’s new stance actually results in a new round of talks remains to be seen. Neither the president nor top officials previewed any imminent new steps from the United States, such as more sanctions on Russia or massive new military aid for Ukraine, that might help shift the trajectory of the war.

And Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday downplayed any “shift in position” in Trump’s stance, saying the president’s Tuesday comments were instead an acknowledgment of the “reality on the ground.”

“He’s doing everything that he can to stop it, but if the Russians refuse to negotiate in good faith, I think it’s going to be very, very bad for the country. That’s what the president made clear. It’s not a shift in position. It’s an acknowledgement of the reality on the ground,” Vance said at an event in Concord, North Carolina.

The vice president said the administration has been “engaged in incredibly good faith negotiations with both the Russians and the Ukrainians” for months, but emphasized Trump’s impatience with Moscow.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who’d said on Tuesday that the Ukraine war “cannot end militarily” — and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met for a bit under an hour Wednesday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

Rubio called on “Moscow to take meaningful steps toward a durable resolution of the Russia-Ukraine war” and “reiterated President Trump’s call for the killing to stop,” according to a two-sentence US readout of the meeting.

Asked by CNN how their meeting went, Lavrov gave a thumbs up. He did not answer CNN’s other shouted questions on whether he was concerned about Trump’s shifting tone or whether he thought the US had turned its back on Russia.

Just hours after Trump’s Truth Social post on Tuesday, Rubio had told the UN Security Council that the Ukraine war “will end at a negotiating table,” which seemed to run counter to the president’s call for Ukraine to keep fighting.

Among several European officials, Trump’s Tuesday statement was interpreted as less of a show of solidarity and more as a way to distance himself from the war altogether. Many pointed out that the economic conditions Trump cited in his Tuesday Truth Social post have been true for months.

“In any event, I wish both Countries well,” Trump wrote in his message.

The US president has in recent days grown more upset, both in public and private, that Putin hasn’t agreed to meet for talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky after suggesting he was open to it during his summit with Trump in Alaska last month.

And Trump has been acknowledging that the war in Ukraine has been harder to resolve than he expected — a rare admission for a president usually loathe to concede he was wrong.

While Trump’s position on who is to blame for the war has swung like a pendulum between Putin and Zelensky, he now appears stung that his personal relationship with the Russian leader hasn’t yielded progress in ending the war.

But aside from his public shift in position, Trump has stopped short of taking steps that might make a difference on the ground.

The president remains adamant that new US sanctions on Moscow won’t happen until European nations cut off their purchases of Russian energy.

And he has not previewed any major new military assistance, touting instead his new system where NATO nations purchase American equipment that is then shipped to Ukraine.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

CNN’s Kit Maher and Jennifer Hansler contributed to this report.

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