WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said on Thursday that Washington and NATO allies were "stepping up the pressure" to end the war in Ukraine, after his outreach to Russia's Vladimir Putin failed to achieve a ceasefire.
"Yeah, we are stepping up the pressure," Trump said in the Oval Office during a meeting with Finnish President Alexander Stubb when asked by an AFP reporter if he would increase efforts for a deal.
"We're stepping it up together. We're all stepping it up. NATO has been great," he added.
Trump this week brokered a peace deal in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, but has said that the war sparked by Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine was proving even harder to solve.
Trump hosted Putin in Alaska in August but failed to achieve a breakthrough, and since then Russia's attacks on Ukraine have escalated.
Russia said on Wednesday that momentum towards reaching a peace deal in Ukraine had largely vanished following the meeting.
Stubb said he was confident that Trump would be able to push through a deal on Ukraine following the Gaza deal between Israel and Hamas.
"I think this one will be the next big one," Stubb told reporters.
Suggests Spain be expelled from NATO
While speaking, President Trump suggested that Spain be expelled from NATO over its failure to match the higher defense spending requirement he has engineered.
"We had one laggard, it was Spain," Trump told reporters.
"They have no excuse not to do this, but that's all right. Maybe you should throw them out of NATO frankly."
In June, the 32-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization agreed to massively boost defense spending over the next decade under pressure from Trump, who at the time threatened to punish Madrid on trade for resisting the new target of five percent of GDP.
Spain's socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has insisted Madrid would not need to hit the headline figure. Spain has been one of the lowest-spending NATO countries on defense in relative terms.
The US president — who has repeatedly suggested Washington could withhold protection from European countries unwilling to spend more on defense — rammed through the commitment to spend 5% of their GDPs on security-related spending in a move seen as key to keeping him engaged with NATO.
That headline figure breaks down as 3.5% on core defense spending and 1.5% on a looser range of areas such as infrastructure and cyber security.
The new target replaces the alliance's former military spending goal of 2%, first set back in 2014.
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