US President Donald Trump said on Saturday that Washington will “take a pass” at talks to end the Ukraine war if there is no progress within days from the warring sides.
For several months, Mr Trump has been pressing for a truce, but has failed to make any progress and concessions from the Kremlin despite an ice-breaking call with Russian President Vladimir Putin and repeated negotiations with Moscow.
“If, for some reason, one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we're just going to say: 'You're foolish. You're fools. You're horrible people' and we're going to just take a pass,” Mr Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
“But, hopefully we won't have to do that.”
The decision to abandon talks could come “very shortly”, Mr Trump said, adding that “no specific number of days, but quickly. We want to get it done.”
“We're talking about here people dying. We're going to get it stopped, ideally,” Mr Trump said in response to a question about a deal between Moscow and Kyiv.
The comments by Mr Trump come after Secretary of State Marco Rubio set the clock ticking, saying in Paris that the US could “move on” from its role brokering the negotiations.
Mr Rubio said, following a meeting with European officials in Paris to discuss a ceasefire, that Washington needed to figure out soon whether a ceasefire was “doable in the short term”.
“Because if it's not, then I think we're just going to move on,” he told reporters.
But speaking on a trip to Italy, US Vice President JD Vance insisted he was “optimistic” about ending the three-year war.
Mr Trump promised to end the conflict within 24 hours of taking office in January but has little to show for his efforts so far.
Russia said on Friday that some progress had been made in talks about ending the war in Ukraine but that contacts were complicated with Washington. “Contacts are quite complicated, because, naturally, the topic is not an easy one,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
