Trump taking harder approach towards Russia, says US former adviser

By Elizabeth Piper

KYIV (Reuters) - President Donald Trump is adopting a tougher approach towards Russia to secure the ceasefire he promised when he took office after becoming "really aligned" with Ukraine, the U.S. leader's former special representative said on Thursday.

Kurt Volker, Trump's Ukraine adviser in his first term and former U.S. Ambassador to the NATO military alliance, told Reuters the U.S. leader had started his second term with a challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin to secure peace either "the easy way or the hard way".

Now, after 100 days of his presidency have passed and with Putin showing little willingness to end the war against Ukraine, Trump is increasingly taking the "hard way", Volker said on the sidelines of a security conference in Kyiv.

"I think it is in Ukraine's interest to have an end to the fighting, and so now that the U.S. and Ukraine are really aligned, it exposes how Putin is simply not willing to end the war," said Volker, who resigned as his adviser in 2019 after being named in a whistleblower complaint about the Trump administration.

"Exactly," he responded when asked whether Trump was now taking the hard route, rather than the easy one, adding Congress should strengthen the U.S. leader's hand by approving secondary sanctions against major entities in Russia.

After a disastrous meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in February, the two have gone a long way to patching things up. Their two countries signed a minerals deal in Washington last month which hands the United States preferential access to new Ukrainian minerals deals.

That for Trump, Volker said, was "politically important" because it allowed him to show his backers that Ukraine was paying its way rather than using U.S. taxpayers' money.

While Ukraine hopes the deal, to be voted on in parliament later on Thursday, will unlock the delivery of new U.S. weapons, at this stage, Trump is reluctant to talk about "the military side" while he tries to cajole Putin to end the fighting.

But that does not mean military aid will not be forthcoming.

"So what it does do, from a security perspective, is it gives the U.S. a stake in Ukraine's prosperity, economic development, security, its survival," said Volker.

"It doesn't spell out what kind of obligations or commitments the U.S. would make toward Ukraine's security. But that doesn't prevent anything either."

(Reporting by Elizabeth Piper; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)