War crimes investigators exhume bodies from a cemetery in Izyum, in eastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, 22 September 2022. Photo: EPA-EFE / OLEG PETRASYUK
US President Donald Trump told reporters on Sunday night that he would hold a phone call with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, as it emerged that the US was leaving an international group formed to investigate Russia’s leadership for the crime of aggression against Ukraine.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One as he flew from Florida to Washington late on Sunday, Trump said that “a lot of work” towards ending the war had been done over the weekend and that he planned to discuss topics including land and power stations with Putin.
“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end. Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance”, Trump said, adding that the prospect of “dividing up certain assets” had already been raised in talks.
Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, who travelled to Moscow for talks with Vladimir Putin last week, told CNN on Sunday that his conversation with Russia’s de facto leader was "positive” and “solution-based” and that Putin accepted “the philosophy of President Trump” and supported a negotiated end to the war.
The US had “narrowed the differences” between the Russian and Ukrainian positions on how an end to the war should look, Witkoff said, though he declined to elaborate on what demands the Russians had made.
Earlier on Sunday, The Independent reported that Kyiv had drawn up a series of ground rules for reaching a negotiated ending the war, which include a ban on Kyiv making any further territorial concessions to Russia; the return of all Ukrainian children forcibly displaced to Russia and all Ukrainian civilians illegally held by Russia, as well as international security guarantees for its sovereignty.
On Monday, The New York Times reported that the US had informed European officials it would be withdrawing from the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, a group established to investigate the role of Russia’s political and military leadership in the invasion of Ukraine.
The decision to leave the group represented a step away from “holding Mr. Putin personally accountable for crimes committed against Ukrainians”, The New York Times said, adding that the Trump administration was also reducing the work of the US Justice Department’s War Crimes Accountability Team, which was launched in 2022 to investigate atrocities committed by Russian forces during the invasion.
