Trump calls for ‘immediate’ cease-fire in Ukraine and says a US withdrawal from NATO is possible

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump on Sunday called for an immediate cease-fire in Russia’s war with Ukraine and the president-elect renewed warnings that he was open to pulling the United States out of NATO.

Trump made his cease-fire proposal after a weekend meeting in Paris with French and Ukrainian leaders, claiming in a social media post that Kyiv “would like to make a deal” to end the more than 1,000-day war. The Kremlin responded that it was open to negotiations, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy cautioned that any deal would have to pave the way to a lasting peace.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said Russia and Ukraine have each 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,” Trump said. He urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to act to bring an end to the fighting.

Trump’s remarks came after the meeting Saturday with Zelenskyy and French President Emmanuel Macron that Zelenskyy described as “constructive.”

In a post Sunday on the Telegram messaging app, Zelenskyy cautioned that Ukraine needs a “just and robust peace, that Russians will not destroy within a few years.”

“When we talk about an effective peace with Russia, we must talk first of all about effective peace guarantees. Ukrainians want peace more than anyone else. Russia brought war to our land,” Zelenskyy said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reiterated Moscow’s long-standing message that it is open to talks with Ukraine. He referenced a decree by Zelenskyy from October 2022 that formally declared the prospect of any talks “impossible” as long as Putin was the…