Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) began a CNN interview Wednesday by knocking the network’s reporting on President Trump’s negotiations with Ukraine over a rare mineral deal in exchange for aid provided for Ukraine’s defensive war with Russia.
A framework for a mineral deal that could financially benefit the U.S. reportedly has been worked out between U.S. and Ukrainian negotiators, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is slated to travel to the White House on Friday to finalize an agreement.
Murphy opened an appearance on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” by pushing back on a report from CNN correspondent Nick Paton Walsh in Kyiv who said the Trump administration has not provided “full transparency” on the deal.
“I have a lot of respect for your reporters, but this notion that we don’t know what Trump is doing is nonsense,” Murphy, a longtime Trump critic, said immediately after the report. “Donald Trump has been very consistent for years: He does not want to support Ukraine’s bid for independence, and he and the people that work for him increasingly are literally just spinning Kremlin propaganda.”
Trump during a Monday press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron at the White House teased the mineral deal with Ukraine, sharing the update on the three-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor that prompted the ongoing war.
The U.S., under the Biden administration, sent military aid and funding to help Ukraine, but Trump has signaled a shift — pushing negotiations for a peace deal primarily with Russian officials and excluding Ukrainian leaders and those from other European countries with similar stakes in the war.
Ukrainian officials say Kyiv has agreed to a framework for an economic deal that it hopes will maintain support, but Walsh reported details have been murky about demands from the U.S. side.
“They [Ukrainian officials] reframed it to, as they described it to us yesterday, as a reconstruction deal for Ukraine, saying that the finalized draft yesterday that was sent didn’t contain the security guarantees that Ukraine wanted but had also taken out some of the thornier items that had been asked for them by the Trump administration, leaving some of those uglier details for later discussions,” Walsh said.
