Trump tells Russia to 'get moving' with Ukraine peace talks to stop 'terrible and senseless war'
11 April 2025, 16:16
US President Donald Trump has told Putin to 'get moving' with peace negotiations as 'thousands die a week' in the Ukraine war.
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President Trump told his followers on social media platform Truth Social that Russia needs to "get moving" on peace talks with Ukraine.
"Russia has to get moving. Too many people are drying, thousands a week, in a terrible and senseless war," he wrote.
"A war that should have never happened, and wouldn’t have happened, if I were President!!!"
Estimates of Russian deaths in the three-year war have ranged from around 160,000 to about 250,000 - not including all the wounded, who number hundreds of thousands more.
Ukrainian casualties have reached 44,000, accoutring to The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
This comes as Russia said they will not accept Donald Trump’s Ukraine peace plan while Zelenskyy remains in power, the Kremlin has said.
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Peace talks have stalled in recent weeks with Donald Trump declaring he is "very angry and p***** off" with Vladimir Putin for blocking a deal.
Russia’s indication that no ceasefire will be agreed while Volodymyr Zelenskyy comes after Trump threatened to impose secondary tariffs on Russian oil unless a deal can be made to “stop the bloodshed.”
But a Kremlin minister has warned Russia will never agree to a peace plan while the so-called “root causes” for its invasion of Ukraine remain in place.
In Russia, the term “root cause” is used as shorthand for Ukraine’s Western-allied government.
Trump admits his disappointment with Putin over Zelensky comments
“We have not heard from Trump a signal to Kyiv to end the war,” Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said.
“All that exists today is an attempt to find some kind of scheme that would first allow us to achieve a ceasefire, as imagined by the Americans, and then move on to some other models and schemes. [But] as far as we can see, there is no place in them today for our main demand; namely to resolve the problems related to the root causes of this conflict.”
He added: “We take the models and solutions proposed by the Americans very seriously, but we can’t accept all this as it is.”
It comes after the White House said on Tuesday Trump was becoming “frustrated” with both Russia and Ukraine.
Trump recently declared he was “very angry and p***** off with Putin” as peace talks continued to stall.
He said that comments made by Putin last Friday, in which he called for a "transitional government" to take power in Ukraine in place of Zelenskyy were "not going in the right direction".
Trump told NBC: “If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault — which it might not be — but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia.
“That would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States. There will be a 25% tariff on all oil, a 25- to 50-point tariff on all oil.”
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil magnate who was jailed on trumped-up charges and now lives in exile, told LBC's Andrew Marr that Trump's "verbal actions" have put Putin in "a rather comfortable position", along with recent military successes.
Estimates of Russian deaths in the three-year war have ranged from around 160,000 to about 250,000 - leading to some murmurings of political dissent against the regime - but Mr Khodorkovsky said that Trump's comments about the war, in which he criticised Ukraine, had helped the Russian leader.
Mr Khodorkovsky, 61, said that Trump engaging with Putin had "led to the situation when the Russian population has rallied round and wants to see a victory in this war".
He added: "Not enough pressure unfortunately has been put on Putin.
"But we, the Russian anti-war opposition, are trying to do everything we can to kind of get everybody, including Europe, to put more pressure on the regime."