President Donald Trump today told reporters that US national security officials have determined that Ukraine did not target a residence belonging to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a drone attack last week \u2013 disputing Kremlin claims that Trump had initially greeted with deep concern.<\/p>\n
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov last week said Ukraine launched a wave of drones at Putin\u2019s state residence in the northwestern Novgorod region that the Russian defence systems were able to defeat. Lavrov also criticised Kyiv for launching the attack at a moment of intensive negotiations to end the war.<\/p>\n
The allegation came just a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had travelled to Florida for talks with Trump on the US administration’s still-evolving 20-point plan aimed at ending the war, and had Zelensky quickly denied it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t believe that strike happened,” Trump told reporters as he travelled back to Washington on Sunday (local time) after spending two weeks at his home in Florida.<\/p>\n
Trump addressed the US determination after European officials argued that the Russian claim was nothing more than an effort by Moscow to undermine the peace effort.<\/p>\n
But Trump, at least initially, had appeared to take the Russian allegations at face value. He told reporters last Monday (local time) that Putin had also raised the matter during a phone he had with the Russian leader earlier that day. And Trump said he was \u201cvery angry\u201d about the accusation.<\/p>\n
By Wednesday (local time), Trump appeared to be downplaying the Russian claim. He posted a link to a New York Post editorial on his social media platform that raised doubt about the Russian allegation. The editorial lambasted Putin for choosing “lies, hatred, and death\u201d at a moment that Trump has claimed is \u201ccloser than ever before\u201d to moving the two sides to a deal to end the war.<\/p>\n
The US president has struggled to deliver on a pledge to quickly end the war in Ukraine and has shown irritation with both Zelensky and Putin as he tried to mediate an end to a conflict he boasted on the campaign trail that he could end in one day.<\/p>\n
Both Trump and Zelensky said last week they made progress in their talks at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort on a 20-point peace plan.<\/p>\n
But Putin has shown little interest in ending the war until all of Russia’s objectives are met, including winning control of all Ukrainian territory in the key industrial Donbas region and imposing severe restrictions on the size of Ukraine’s post-war military and the type of weaponry it can possess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump today told reporters that US national security officials have determined that Ukraine did not target…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269852,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9,10,356,18,13,14,6,19,17,11,12,15,16,5,1539,7,8],"class_list":{"0":"post-269851","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-featured-news","13":"tag-featurednews","14":"tag-headlines","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-latest-news","18":"tag-latestnews","19":"tag-main-news","20":"tag-mainnews","21":"tag-news","22":"tag-north-america","23":"tag-top-stories","24":"tag-topstories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115846919110317269","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269851\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}