Kremlin casts doubt on Trump's push for Ukraine peace as rifts remain unresolved

Russia’s top diplomat laid out the wide gaps between Moscow and Kyiv and put a damper on hopes that President Donald Trump will propel a swift end to the war in Ukraine.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in an exclusive interview taped Friday that there was no meeting planned between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and that key issues — including security guarantees for Ukraine and territorial disputes— remain unresolved.
Putin “is ready to meet with President Zelenskyy, provided this meeting is really going to decide something,” he said. “To meet, for Zelenskyy to have another opportunity to be onstage, is not what we believe is useful.”

Even as Trump has met separately this month with Putin, Zelenskyy and European leaders, his overtures for peace have been undermined by Russia’s continued deadly strikes on Ukraine, including on a U.S.-owned factory last week.

The White House is now seeking a Putin-Zelenskyy summit, but Lavrov’s grievances underscored just how far apart the two sides remain.

He said it was Ukraine that was hindering the peace process, along with European leaders who Lavrov said “don’t want peace.”

“They say, ‘We cannot allow defeat of Ukraine. We cannot allow Russia to win.’ They speak in these terms: win, defeat and so on,” he said.

Ukraine, which celebrated its independence day on Sunday, is being pressured to give up Russian-annexed Crimea as well as its eastern Donbas region and abandon any hope of joining NATO, the U.S.-led military alliance founded after World War II to counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union.

“Zelenskyy said no to everything,” Lavrov said. “How can we meet with a person who is pretending to be a leader?”