US President-elect Donald Trump has called for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, claiming Kyiv “would like to make a deal” to end the more than 1,000-day war.
Shortly after a meeting in Paris with French and Ukrainian leaders, Mr Trump claimed on his Truth Social platform that Moscow and Kyiv have both lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in a war that “should never have started”.
Calling on Russian President Vladimir Putin to act to bring the fighting to an end, Mr Trump said: “There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin. Too many lives are being needlessly wasted, too many families destroyed.”
His remarks came after a meeting on Saturday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was urged by Donald Trump to bring the war to an end (Yuri Kochetkov/pool/AP)
Speaking to reporters later that day, Mr Zelensky described the meeting as “constructive”.
He insisted any peace deal “should be just” for Ukrainians, “so that Russia and Putin or any other aggressors will not have the opportunity to return”.
In a separate social media update on Sunday, Mr Zelensky asserted that Kyiv has so far lost 43,000 soldiers since Moscow’s all-out invasion on February 24, 2022, while a further 370,000 have been injured.
Both Russia and Ukraine have been reluctant to publish official casualty figures, but Western officials have said the past few months of grinding positional warfare in eastern Ukraine have meant record losses for both sides, with tens of thousands killed and injured each month.