United States President Donald Trump said he plans to speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday (Mar 18) and discuss ending the war in Ukraine.
"I'll be speaking to President Putin on Tuesday. A lot of work's been done over the weekend," Trump told reporters on Air Force One during a late flight back to the Washington area from Florida.
"We want to see if we can bring that war to an end. Maybe we can, maybe we can't, but I think we have a very good chance," the president added.
Trump is trying to win Putin's support for a 30-day ceasefire proposal that Ukraine accepted last week, as both sides continued trading heavy aerial strikes through the weekend.
Russia moved closer to ejecting Ukrainian forces from their months-old foothold in the western Russian region of Kursk.
"We will be talking about land. We will be talking about power plants," Trump said when asked about concessions.
"I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides, Ukraine and Russia. We are already talking about that, dividing up certain assets."
The US president said in a social media post on Friday that he had "strongly requested" that Putin not kill the thousands of Ukrainian troops that Russia is pushing out of Kursk.
Putin said he would honour Trump's request to spare the lives of the Ukrainian troops if they surrendered.
The Kremlin also said on Friday that Putin had sent Trump a message about his ceasefire plan via Witkoff, expressing "cautious optimism" that a deal could be reached to end the conflict.
In separate appearances on Sunday shows, Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump's national security adviser Mike Waltz, emphasised that there are still challenges to be worked out before Russia agrees to a ceasefire, much less a final peaceful resolution to the war.
Asked on ABC whether the US would accept a peace deal in which Russia was allowed to keep stretches of eastern Ukraine that it has seized, Waltz replied: "Are we going to drive every Russian off of every inch of Ukrainian soil?"
