Donald Trump says Russia and Ukraine like ‘children fighting in a park’ in White House meeting with Friedrich Merz – as it happened | Nato

Donald Trump welcomed Friedrich Merz to the White House on Thursday for talks on Ukraine and Russia, tariffs and defence spending, kicking off a meeting seen largely as successful as the German chancellor emerged unscathed without the fireworks that have characterised Trump’s other Oval Office meetings with foreign leaders.

• Trump voiced doubts about the potential success of peace talks, saying it may be better to let Ukraine and Russia “fight for a while” rather than pursue peace immediately. He likened the conflict to “two young children fighting like crazy in a park”.

• Trump said he will continue supporting Ukraine and that he had urged Putin not to retaliate after Ukraine’s unpredecented drone attack last weekend. “I said ’don’t do it,’” he told reporters.

• Trump described Merz as a “very great” representative of Germany and also “difficult”. He said US troops would remain in Germany and said it was positive that Berlin was spending more money on defence.

• Merz urged Trump to increase pressure on Russia, as he sought to remind the US president that the violence he abhorred seeing was a result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

• Merz presented Trump with a gift: a facsimile of the birth certificate of Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, who was born in Germany in 1869.

• Merz said he and Trump “agree on this war” and that the US president is “the key person in the world who can really [stop it] by putting pressure on Russia.”

• Meanwhile, Russia’s ambassador to the UK, Andrei Kelin, warned that Ukraine’s recent drone attack risk escalating the conflict to “World War III” as he partly blamed the UK.

The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog (IAEA) said his team at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine heard repeated rounds of gunfire that appeared to be aimed at drones reportedly attacking the site’s training centre.

The IAEA team on site reported hearing at least five explosions between 11.30am and 1.45pm local time, each preceded by gunfire, according to a statement.

There were no immediate reports of any damage to the centre.

Friedrich Merz appears to have done his job well, according to some German media voices, following his meeting with Donald Trump in the White House.

Maria Fiedler, deputy head of Der Spiegel’s Berlin bureau, had this bit of snap analysis of the German chancellor’s Oval Office debut:

Merz may well have already completed the trickiest part. While he wasn’t the center of attention – the US media aren’t interested in him – he made his points.

He flattered Trump, highlighting his importance to ending the war in Ukraine. He showed himself grateful for the US’s historical achievement ridding Germany of the Nazi dictatorship. And he took note of advice from other heads of state who previously visited Trump: don’t talk too much, Trump has a short attention span.

It remains to be seen, whether he can get concrete results behind the scenes now, for example for Ukraine.

Russia’s ambassador to the UK warned that Ukraine’s recent drone attack risk escalating the conflict to “World War III” as he partly blamed the UK.

Andrei Kelin, in an interview with Sky News on Thursday, said Ukraine’s actions “are bringing the conflict to a different level of escalation” and that Kyiv should “not try to engulf World War III”.

“That’s the very worst case scenario that we can imagine,” he said.

Kelin said Ukraine must have had assistance in last weekend’s unprecedented drone attack, as he pointed the finger at London.

This kind of attack involves “provision of very high technology, so-called geospaced data, which only can be done by those who have it in possession. And this is London and Washington,” he said, adding:

I don’t believe that America [is involved], that has been denied by President Trump, definitely, but it has not been denied by London. We perfectly know how much London is involved, how deeply British forces are involved in working together with Ukraine.

Donald Trump, speaking to reporters during his meeting with Friedrich Merz, compared the Russia-Ukraine conflict to “two young children fighting”.

“Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy,” the US president said.

They hate each other, and they’re fighting in a park, and you try and pull them apart. They don’t want to be pulled.

“Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart,” he added.

Trump said he used that same analogy during a conversation with Vladimir Putin on Wednesday.

I said, ‘President, maybe you have to keep fighting and suffering a lot, because both sides are suffering, before you pull them apart, before they’re able to be pulled apart.’

Here’s some more analysis from the first meeting between US president Donald Trump and Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, at the White House.

The meeting struck a “very friendly” tone and avoided what some had feared would be an uncomfortable encounter, according to Deutsche Welle’s Washington DC bureau chief Ines Pohl. She said:

All the fear that he [Merz] might be ambushed by this fireside, didn’t happen. This meeting between the two was a huge success from the German perspective.

She said that Merz was able to flatter Trump by saying, “You are the most important person to end that terrible war [between Russia and Ukraine],” while also emphasising that Russia was the aggressor, not Ukraine.

Merz meets Trump after ‘historic’ Nato decisions in Brussels – day so far

Jakub Krupa

• The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is meeting the US president, Donald Trump, at the White House this evening for talks on Ukraine and Russia, and trade, among other things (17:41).

• Trump said the pair was “unhappy” about the state of war, but insisted they would be successful in stopping the bloodshed (17:50).

• The US president also suggested he would be happy to keep US troops in Germany (18:00) amid concerns about the on-going review of the US force posture (12:25).

• The chancellor gifted Trump a fascimile of the birth certificate of Trump’s German grandfather, Friedrich Trump (18:35).

• Earlier, Nato defence ministers agreed a “historic” change to capability targets amid a broader push to increase defence spending to 5% at this month’s summit in The Hague (17:19).

• Earlier in the day, the Nato secretary general Mark Rutte said the new target would apply to all countries, including the US and the UK.

• On Monday, Rutte will meet the UK prime minister Keir Starmer.

And that’s all from me, Jakub Krupa in London, but Léonie Chao-Fong in Washington will guide you through the next developments.

If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com.

I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.

And if you are wondering what is this framed document that Merz gave Trump as a gift, here’s a handy video from the chancellor himself explaining the story behind it.

It’s a facsimile of the birth certificate of Trump’s German grandfather, Friedrich Trump, who later changed his name to Frederick.

He says:

This will be my gift for American President Donald Trump and my visit to Washington, when I meet him for the first time. This is his grandfather’s birth certificate with an English translation. It was created by the Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany. The calligraphy is truly sensational.

Merz’s visit at White House – snap analysis

Jakub Krupa

And that’s it, they wrap up here.

Merz emerges unscathed, as he chose not to challenge Trump on some of his comments about the alleged disparity in the value of support from the US and Europe, but focused on their similarities and shared views instead.

But he conveys a strong, positive message on Ukraine, and got Trump to say he is “with Ukraine” and suggest he would be prepared to keep US troops in Germany.

Good enough, surely?

Merz finally gets a say too, as he says “we both agree on this war and how terrible this war is, and we are both looking for ways to stop it very soon.”

He says Trump is “the key person in the world who can really [stop it] by putting pressure on Russia,” and adds he will want to discuss this in more detail in bilateral talks.

He adds:

“And I think … we have the duty to do something on that now, to stop it after three and a half years, which is really terrible.

Look at the kids, the kids which were kidnapped from Ukraine to Russia. This is this is all terrible.

And so we are talking about instruments, measures, what we can do, and my personal view is clear on that we are on the side of Ukraine, and we are trying to get them stronger and stronger, just to make Putin stop this war.”

Trump gets asked if he will continue to support Ukraine.

“Yeah, I’m with Ukraine. We just signed a big deal on rare earth with Ukraine, and…

You know what I’m for, stopping killing, really, that’s what I’m for again, a war that would have never started, should have never started.”

He talks about the support for Ukraine from the US and Europe offering potentially questionable calculations, but then goes back to the main point:

“It’s a little bit money, but not the money. The big thing, the big thing is the death,” he says.

Continuing his comments, Trump mentions the Nord Stream 2 pipeline again and that he stopped it from operating.

“It was a mistake,” Merz admits.

Trump acknowledges his comments and continues:

“I used to go with Angela, I’d say, Well, wait a minute, we’re spending all this money to defend you against Russia, and then you’re giving Russia billions of dollars a month. What kind of a deal is that?”

Trump gets asked about if he would put more sanctions on Russia.

He says he will be “very, very tough” if it becomes clear that the war will not end soon.

But, in a comment likely to alarm Ukraine’s allies, he adds: “it could be on both countries, to be honest, it takes two to tango.”

He then says:

“We’re going to be very tough, whether it’s Russia or anybody else, we’re going to be very tough, that’s a bloodbath that’s going on over there.”

He then uses a hockey analogy, of allowing the two sides to have a go at each other for a bit, before intervening.

But he says it’s all difficult.

“There’s some bad blood between the two. I have to deal with it and the chancellor has to deal with it, it’s incredible [as] … there’s a great hatred between those two, between those two men, but between the warring parties, great hatred.”

He suggests Putin told him “we have no choice but to attack” in response to the latest Ukrainian attacks inside Russia.

“And it’s probably not going to be pretty. I don’t like it. I said, Don’t do it. You shouldn’t do it. You should stop it. But again, there’s a lot of hatred.”

Trump also gets asked about Russian president Vladimir Putin.

He repeats his usual lines and claims that it would have never happened with him in the White House and so on.

But he doesn’t answer the question directly.

“I’ve been saying that for a long time, the amount of death in that war is far greater than the news has been reporting. Or that, frankly, that either side has been reported. It’s a very sad thing,” he says.

Merz is much more focused as he says he is here “to talk with you later on how we could contribute” to ending the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

He says it’s the D-Day anniversary tomorrow – which Trump jokes was “not a pleasant day for you” – and he wants to talk with Trump about “what we can do jointly, and we are ready to do what we can.”

“You know that we gave support to Ukraine and that we are looking for more pressure on Russia, the European Union did, and we should talk about that,” he says.

“We will talk about it,” Trump replies.

Trump gets asked about Elon Musk’s criticism of his financial plans and he goes into a level of detail that probably goes beyond the Europe blog.

But what is interesting is that he says “Elon and I had a great relationship,” and adds “I don’t know if we will any more”.

He later says:

“I’ll tell you, he’s not the first, people leave my administration, and they love us, and then at some point they miss it so badly, and some of them embrace it, and some of them actually become hostile.

I don’t know what it is, it’s sort of Trump derangement syndrome, I guess they call it, but we have it with others too.

They leave and they wake up in the morning, and the glamour is gone, the whole world is different, and they become hostile. I don’t know what it is.”