President-elect Donald Trump’s team shut down a former adviser’s assertion that the Trump administration’s priority for Ukraine would be establishing peace, not restoring territory lost to Russia, including Crimea.
Bryan Lanza, a Republican strategist who worked on Trump’s presidential campaign and is not involved in the transition, said in an interview that the new Trump administration would ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a “realistic vision of peace.”
“If President Zelensky comes to the table and says: well, we can only have peace if we have Crimea, he is showing us that he is not serious. Crimea is gone,” Lanza said on the BBC World Service broadcast. Weekend program.
The U.S. priority would be “peace and stopping the killings,” Lanza said.
A spokesperson for Trump’s transition team denied that Lanza spoke on Trump’s behalf. He “does not work for or speak for President Trump,” the spokesperson told the BBC.
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A Trump spokesperson was contacted by email for further comment. Lanza declined to provide further comment when contacted by News week.
Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and occupied territories in eastern Ukraine after launching a full-scale invasion of the country in 2022.
During the election campaign, Trump repeatedly criticized President Joe Biden’s handling of the Ukraine war and said he would secure a Ukraine-Russia peace deal within a day if he were elected.
He did not reveal how this would be achieved, but did not rule out the possibility that Ukraine would have to cede land to Russia.
He also criticized Zelensky on the campaign trail, calling him “the greatest salesman on Earth” for securing billions of dollars in U.S. military aid.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Trump’s advisers had proposed freezing the war, allowing Russia to keep the territory it conquered and create a demilitarized zone in eastern Ukraine.
Zelensky has repeatedly stated that Russian forces must be expelled and all territories captured by Russia, including Crimea, must be returned to Ukraine for peace to be established.
Zelensky spoke with Trump by phone on Wednesday, with billionaire Elon Musk joining the call, according to multiple media outlets.
He rejected Trump’s plans for a quick peace deal on Thursday, saying it would be a “loss” for Ukraine.
“I believe that President Trump really wants a quick decision” to end the war, Zelensky told reporters in Budapest. “That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen that way.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin is “open to constructive dialogue based on justice, equality and mutual respect for each other’s concerns,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday.
He “remains committed to this position and has reiterated it several times,” he said, according to the official Russian news agency Tass. “But today the US administration has a contrary position. Let’s wait and see what happens in January.”
