WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump suggested Friday it would be premature to give Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, saying as he hosted Volodymyr Zelensky that he hoped to secure peace with Russia first.<\/p>\n
\u201cHopefully they won\u2019t need it. Hopefully we\u2019ll be able to get the war over with without thinking about Tomahawks,\u201d Trump told journalists including an AFP reporter as the two leaders met at the White House.<\/p>\n
Trump added that he was confident of getting Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the invasion he launched in 2022, following a phone call with the Kremlin chief a day earlier.<\/p>\n
The US and Russian presidents agreed on Thursday to a new summit in the Hungarian capital Budapest, which would be their first since an August meeting in Alaska that failed to produce any kind of peace deal.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that President Putin wants to end the war,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n
But Zelensky, who wore a dark suit for his third meeting with Trump in Washington since the US president\u2019s return to power, demurred, saying that Putin was \u201cnot ready\u201d for peace.<\/p>\n
Ukraine has been lobbying Washington for Tomahawks for weeks, arguing that the missiles could help put pressure on Russia to end its brutal three-and-a-half year invasion.<\/p>\n
But on the eve of Zelensky\u2019s visit, Putin warned Trump in a call against delivering the weapons, saying it could escalate the war and jeopardize peace talks.<\/p>\n
Trump said the United States had to be careful to not \u201cdeplete\u201d its own supplies of Tomahawks, which have a range of over 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump suggested Friday it would be premature to give Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, saying as he hosted Volodymyr Zelensky that he hoped to secure peace with Russia first. \u201cHopefully they won\u2019t need it. Hopefully we\u2019ll be able to get the war over with without thinking about Tomahawks,\u201d Trump told journalists including …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":88361,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88343"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88363,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88343\/revisions\/88363"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}