President Trump accused Volodymyr Zelenskyy of never wanting peace, held new Russia sanctions in reserve, and said talks are moving forward anyway.
President Trump said Sunday he is working to end the fighting between Russia and Ukraine, and he put the blame for delay squarely on Kyiv’s leader.
In a Truth Social post, Trump said he is “in the process of negotiating Peace” in the war and charged that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.” He tied that claim to Ukraine’s battered condition after Russia’s full-scale invasion four and a half years ago, and he said he would not rush fresh sanctions that could push Moscow away from the table.
The post landed on a weekend already marked by strikes, casualty reports, and dueling statements from Washington, Kyiv, and the Kremlin. Trump cast the moment as one of leverage and progress. Zelenskyy cast it as a test of whether the United States would keep clear who started the war.
Trump did not soften the assessment of Ukraine’s position.
"He could have made a better deal two years ago than he can now. His country is in shambles, a large portion of his land is lost, his oceans and seas are gone, and his male population is low, wounded, and/or dead,"
That was Trump’s description of the costs Kyiv has already paid. He argued Zelenskyy is worse off now than he would have been with an earlier settlement, and he framed continued fighting as a choice Kyiv keeps making.
He also criticized Ukraine’s recent campaign against Russian diesel refineries. In recent months, Ukrainian forces have hit Russian oil infrastructure in a bid to cut cash and fuel for Vladimir Putin’s war effort. Trump treated those strikes as a complication for diplomacy, not a path out of the war.
On sanctions, he was explicit about timing and purpose. He said he decided to hold off on new measures against Russia because he does not “want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.” He added that he can sign additional sanctions “later, or any time that I want.” Reporting on the same package of statements noted he has already waived sanctions in a way that enables Russian diesel exports.
Trump also claimed momentum. “Great progress is being made,” he said, “and that includes current hostage negotiations.” He offered no public roster of hostages or terms, but he put the claim at the center of his case that talks are real and moving.
Zelenskyy answered on a different channel and with a different emphasis.
Speaking Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said he trusted Trump, yet warned that siding with Moscow would be a tragedy and a historic mistake. He refused any moral equivalence with the Russian leader and pressed Washington to keep the origin of the war in view.
"We can't compare me and Putin. He's aggressor. He occupied us. He killed adults and children, his soldiers. He's a terrorist, and that's why I hope that President Trump will be very clear with this position."
He also spoke to the risk that the public simply tunes the war out.
"People want to forget what's going on. But we can't give this possibility to forget, or to change reality, or to change the truth,"
That was Zelenskyy’s case for keeping pressure on Russia and for refusing a rewrite of who invaded whom. Later Sunday, he said on social media he had spoken with U.S. presidential envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner about the results of an Oct. 9 meeting in Miami between U.S. and Ukrainian negotiating teams, and about “next steps in diplomacy.”
Intelligence-sharing and battlefield alerts became another fault line.
Zelenskyy said U.S.-Ukraine intelligence sharing had resumed after being blocked for some period of time. Separate reporting, including from CBS News, said the United States may have intentionally withheld early warnings from Ukraine last week of deadly Russian missile strikes. Ukrainian officials also claimed that crucial satellite data from Elon Musk’s Starlink network had been constrained last week.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio rejected the suggestion of a deliberate U.S. cut-off. He said he was “not sure Zelenskyy knows what he’s talking about, but it wasn’t deliberate,” and added, “We have nothing to do with that.” On Starlink, Rubio said the slowdown was not ordered by Washington.
"The United States, nobody ordered that Starlink speed to be slowed down. It sort of happened, but my understanding is it's been restored. It's back to where it was before."
Rubio’s account treated the episode as a glitch and a misunderstanding, not a policy of leaving Ukraine blind. The clash still underscored how fragile trust is while talks continue and missiles keep flying.
While the statements stacked up, the war did not pause.
Local government authorities in St. Petersburg said an air attack left at least one person killed and five wounded. Fires broke out at the Petersburg Oil Terminal and the Ruchi oil depot. Companies confirmed that an Ozon logistics center and a VK data center were also targeted. Caption material tied the oil-terminal attack to Oct. 18.
In southern Ukraine, local officials in Zaporizhzhia said Sunday that two Russian attacks killed a woman and wounded others, including a 6-year-old girl among at least two people hurt. In Lviv, caption material from the prior day described residents moving through a power outage.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Sunday it had intercepted more than 1,015 Ukrainian drones over 15 Russian regions, the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula, and the Black Sea. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, speaking through the state news agency Tass, said Kyiv was “resisting” Moscow’s invasion but could not “change the current course of events.”
Those claims sit beside Trump’s argument that Ukraine has already lost land, people, and bargaining power, and beside Zelenskyy’s argument that Russia remains the aggressor and must not be rewarded for it. The battlefield facts both sides cite are grim either way: dead civilians, burning fuel sites, mass drone waves, and cities coping with blackouts.
Trump’s sanctions message was the clearest signal of how he wants to run the next phase.
He kept the option to punish Russia. He refused to spend that option in a way he said would wreck talks. He pointed to hostage talks as proof of movement. And he named Zelenskyy, not Putin, as the leader unwilling to finish the war.
For a national audience watching a conflict that began with Russia’s full-scale invasion four and a half years ago, the shape of the dispute is now plain. Washington is advertising a deal track. Kyiv is advertising red lines and memory. Moscow is advertising inevitability. The strikes over the weekend showed none of those messages has stopped the killing.
Trump’s bet is that pressure paired with an open table beats another year of attrition. Zelenskyy’s bet is that clarity about the aggressor matters more than a faster ceasefire on worse terms. Voters who want borders respected, wars ended, and American leverage used coldly can judge which approach matches the wreckage already on the ground.
Peace takes two sides willing to stop, and Trump just said one of them still isn’t.
