Donald Trump called on China to help broker a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine as the incoming US president revealed he had communicated with Xi Jinping.
The conflict had caused enormous losses to both Russia and Ukraine, Mr Trump said, and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky “would like to make a deal” to end the “madness”.
Mr Zelensky was yet to respond to the claim.
Mr Trump’s outreach to China came a day after he made a proposal to end the war during a trilateral meeting with Mr Zelensky and French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris.
“Zelenskyy and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness,” Mr Trump claimed on his social media platform, Truth Social, after meeting Mr Zelensky face-to-face for the first time since winning the election.
“They have ridiculously lost 400,000 soldiers and many more civilians. There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin,” he added. “Too many lives are being so needlessly wasted, too many families destroyed, and if it keeps going, it can turn into something much bigger, and far worse.”
Around 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since February 2022, Volodymyr Zelensky said in a rare update. He said 370,000 injuries had been reported in a post on his social media and said that this tally included soldiers who had been hurt more than once and some of the injuries were said to be minor.
Russia and Ukraine have not previously officially published a tally of their respective military losses of personnel in the nearly three-year-old war and treat the figure as a state secret.
Western intelligence sources estimate the number of Russian dead to be as high as 200,000, with 400,000 wounded.
“I know Vladimir well,” Mr Trump said, referring to Russian president Vladimir Putin. “This is his time to act. China can help. The world is waiting!”
In an interview with NBC aired on Sunday, Mr Trump said he held “communication as recently as this week” with Mr Jinping and that he and the Chinese president got along very well.
He also threatened to cut military aid to Ukraine and pull the US out of Nato.
Asked if he was actively working to end the war in Ukraine, Mr Trump replied in the affirmative, but refused to disclose if he had spoken with Mr Putin since winning election in November.
“I don’t want to say anything about that, because I don’t want to do anything that could impede the negotiation,” Mr Trump said.
China could potentially play a significant role in ending the Ukraine war given its close relationship with Moscow. The relationship only deepened after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 with the two sides describing it as a “no limits” partnership.
Mr Putin touted China as a credible negotiator after Beijing published a 12-point peace plan to end the war last year. The proposal, which did not explicitly call for Russia to leave Ukraine, was rejected by Western countries.
Mr Trump held a trilateral meeting with Mr Macron and Mr Zelensky in Paris on the sidelines of the ceremony to reopen the Notre Dame Cathedral, which was destroyed in a major fire in 2019.
Mr Zelensky thanked Mr Trump for the “good and productive trilateral meeting” but did not provide any details. He cautioned that Ukraine needed a “just and robust peace that Russians will not destroy within a few years”.
“When we talk about an effective peace with Russia, we must talk first of all about effective peace guarantees,” Mr Zelensky said in a Telegram post on Sunday. “Ukrainians want peace more than anyone else. Russia brought war to our land.”
Kyiv is facing a severe shortage of soldiers as Mr Zelensky’s mobilisation efforts to tide over battlefield losses falter, prompting the US to ask for lowering the recruitment age from 25 to 18, a move Mr Zelensky previously rejected due to its unpopularity.
Mr Zelensky’s advisors increasingly see negotiations with Russia as inevitable but stress the need for strong Western security guarantees to make any ceasefire meaningful.
It is not clear if Mr Putin is interested in negotiations yet. The Russian president has laid out clear demands for ending the war, including control over Crimea and at least four eastern regions annexed by Moscow, disarmament of Ukraine and a ban on the country ever joining Nato.
