A top Trump administration official raised eyebrows Thursday by predicting that a meeting between the US president and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin would happen “imminently.”
“At the end of the day, the final settlement will see my boss, President Trump, in the room, sealing the deal,” senior director for counterterrorism Sebastian Gorka said during an interview at Politico’s Security Summit about Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
When reporter Dasha Burns asked Gorka, “Why has the president not met with President Putin?”, the official answered: “Well, we can’t force Putin to meet.
“Deals are all about timing,” he added. “When the time is right, that’s when the president is in the room with Putin. But my expectation is imminently.”
When Burns tried to press for more details, Gorka responded: “That’s all you’re getting.”
A source close to the White House told The Post Thursday there are no plans yet for any sitdown between Trump and Putin.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dispatched a team of negotiators to Istanbul on Thursday for what had been billed as the first direct talks between the warring countries in three years.
Zelensky had offered to personally travel to Turkey and meet with Putin to try to broker a cease-fire but the Kremlin tyrant was not part of the Moscow delegation.
The Trump administration dispatched a delegation that included Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff to partake in the talks, but the president sounded skeptical of success.
“Nothing is going to happen until Putin and I get together,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One Thursday. “He wasn’t going if I wasn’t there. I don’t believe anything’s going to happen, whether you like it or not, until he and I get together. But we’re going to have to get it solved cause too many people are dying.”
“You can rest assured that when the final ink is put on that piece of paper,” Gorka reiterated Thursday, “President Trump will be the person, the man behind the art of the deal, who seals that deal and stops the meat grinder that is the war in Ukraine.”
Trump had made ending the war a top objective of his second term’s foreign policy, and has at times been visibly frustrated by the lack of progress in a brokering a peace deal.
Zelensky previously backed a Trump-proposed 30-day cease-fire, but the Russians rejected it and opted for a scaled-down pause on attacks against Ukrainian infrastructure instead.
Putin has worked to flatter Trump over recent months. Earlier this year, Witkoff recounted Putin telling him that he rushed to church and prayed for Trump after an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa. this past July 13.
The Kremlin leader also “commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump, from the leading Russian artist” and gave it to Witkoff to send to Trump.
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