Trump says he isnt surprised Putin skipped high-stakes Ukraine peace talks and he knows the reason why

President Trump said Thursday he wasn’t at all surprised Russian President Vladimir Putin was snubbing peace talks with Ukraine this week — saying, “Why would he go if I’m not going?”Trump, who had pushed for Putin to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Turkey later on Thursday, brushed off the Russian leader’s decision to skip the high-stakes talks.“I wasn’t planning to go.I would go.

But I wasn’t planning to go.And I said I don’t think he’s going to go if I don’t go, and that turned out to be right,” Trump told reporters in Qatar following a business roundtable.“I actually said, ‘Why would he go if I’m not going?’”Still, the commander-in-chief floated the idea of traveling to Istanbul if enough progress was made between Kyiv and Moscow.“If something happened, I would go on Friday if it was appropriate,” Trump added.He noted, too, that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was already there repping the US.It comes after the Kremlin said Putin had zero plans to attend the peace talks in person — but a Russian delegation was there and ready to meet the Ukrainian side.Asked if Putin would go to Istanbul if Trump showed up, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia didn’t know yet how the negotiations would unfold.“It is premature to say what kind of participation will be required and at what level because we do not know if the Ukrainian negotiators will show up or not and how the negotiations will go,” Peskov said.The push for direct talks between Zelensky and Putin comes amid a flurry of negotiations aimed at producing a cease-fire agreement to bring an end to the three-year war.With Post wires...