KYIV —
US President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday called for an immediate ceasefire in
Ukraine, shortly after a meeting in Paris with French and Ukrainian leaders,
claiming Kyiv “would like to make a deal” to end the more than 1,000-day war.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump claimed that
Moscow and Kyiv have both lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in a war that
“should never have started”.
“There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations
should begin. Too many lives are being needlessly wasted, too many families
destroyed,” he said, as he called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to act to
bring the fighting to an end.
Trump's remarks came after a meeting Saturday with Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, that
Zelenskyy later described as “constructive”.
Speaking to reporters later that day, Zelenskyy insisted
that any peace deal “should be just” for Ukrainians, “so that Russia and Putin
or any other aggressors will not have the opportunity to return”.
In a separate social media update Sunday, Zelenskyy asserted
that Kyiv has so far lost 43,000 soldiers since Moscow's all-out invasion on
Feb 24, 2022, while a further 370,000 have been wounded.
Both Russia and Ukraine have been reluctant to publish
official casualty figures, but Western officials have said that the past few
months of grinding positional warfare in eastern Ukraine have meant record
losses for both sides, with tens of thousands killed and wounded each month.
