President Donald Trump said we’ll know if Vladimir Putin agrees to a ceasefire with Ukraine “in the first couple of minutes” of the two men’s Alaska summit on Friday. “If it’s a bad meeting, I’m not calling anybody. I’m going home,” Trump said on a Thursday phone interview with Brian Kilmeade on his Fox News Radio segment. “We’re going to be calling President Zelensky if it’s a good meeting,” the president said. He compared the summit to a “chess game” and projected a 25 percent chance that he and the Russian president would fail to reach an agreement. “He wants the whole thing,” Trump said, alluding to Putin’s desire to take over Ukraine, but claimed that Putin is more amenable to making peace because of a “certain relationship” he has with Trump. The president didn’t sound so confident at a Wednesday press conference; when asked if he believed he could “convince [Putin] to stop targeting civilians in Ukraine,” Trump replied with a rare statement of defeat, “I guess the answer to that is ‘no,’ because I’ve had this conversation.”
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