Trump says it is time for somebody else to negotiate for Ukraine, and defends Russia as the war grinds on

The president said it plainly, standing on the South Lawn with a campaign trip ahead of him. If Ukraine wants this war ended, it should get somebody else to do the negotiating.

“Zelensky is a man that should have had this war settled a long time ago,” Trump told reporters on Monday before heading to Kansas. “They are losing their male population. Ukraine could have had this thing settled a long time ago. If he would have listened to me, and you remember the Oval Office, he would have had to settle a long time ago. I think it is time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine.”

He went back to the February 2025 Oval Office meeting, the one that ended with Zelensky leaving the White House early, and he defended the Russian president whose army is still taking Ukrainian ground. “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They haven’t been doing much,” Trump said.

The timing of that sentence is part of the story. Earlier on Monday, a Russian drone hit a park in Nova Vodolaha, in the Kharkiv region, where families were out with their children. Six people were killed, including three children, and 15 were injured, as of October 19. Trump did not mention the strike. His argument was the one he has made for months: that the war is a waste of Ukrainian lives, that Kyiv is losing men it cannot replace, and that the obstacle to a settlement sits in Kyiv rather than in Moscow.

Zelensky gave his answer before Trump spoke. On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday he warned that siding with Russia would be a historic mistake, and he has spent the past week arguing that Washington is going soft at the moment Ukraine can least afford it. He points to the administration’s decision two days earlier to waive most of the sanctions and tariffs in the Graham Act, the bipartisan Russia sanctions law Trump signed last month, days before they were due to take effect, and to the diesel arrangement under which Russia is to supply more than 300,000 metric tonnes of the fuel. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Sunday that no sanctions have been lifted and that only the diesel embargo was lifted, and he called Zelensky’s account of the Starlink dispute reckless. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, traveling in Central Asia, has denied the claim from Kyiv that Washington paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine.

More than 125,000 Ukrainians have died in the war by the estimates cited in Monday’s reporting, civilians among them. None of that moved the president’s public position on Monday. He is negotiating, by his own account, and the man on the other side of the table in Kyiv is now, in his telling, the problem.

The picture with this story is an illustration.