Trump calls for ‘immediate ceasefire’ in Ukraine after meeting Zelenskyy in Paris

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday called for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, shortly after a meeting in Paris with French and Ukrainian leaders, claiming Kyiv “would like to make a deal” to end the more than 1,000-day war.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump claimed that Moscow and Kyiv have both lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in a war that “should never have started.”

“There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin. Too many lives are being needlessly wasted, too many families destroyed,” he said, as he called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to act to bring the fighting to an end.

Trump’s remarks came after a meeting Saturday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, that Zelenskyy later described as “constructive”.

Speaking to reporters later that day, Zelenskyy insisted that 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 Sunday, Zelenskyy asserted that Kyiv has so far lost 43,000 soldiers since Moscow’s all-out invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, while a further 370,000 have been wounded.

Both Russia and Ukraine have been reluctant to publish official casualty figures, but Western officials have said that the past few months of grinding positional warfare in eastern Ukraine have meant record losses for both sides, with tens of thousands killed and wounded each month.