February 15, 2025: Donald Trump presidency news

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Russia will have to make concessions to end the war in Ukraine, the Trump administration’s Russia-Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg said Saturday.

The concessions would primarily involve territorial matters, and possibly the renunciation of the use of force, Kellogg said at a panel discussion at the Munich Security Conference.

Putin is “not going to downsize his military forces,” the American diplomat said, but the US hopes “to force” him into actions he is “uncomfortable with.”

Kellogg said the US could achieve this by disrupting Russia’s recently formed alliances — such as those with Iran, North Korea, and China — that were non-existent just a few years ago.

Kellogg also said the US could put pressure on Putin’s oil revenue through stricter sanctions. He rated the West’s current efforts on enforcing sanctions on Russia as a three out of 10.

“If you think you’re going to kill your way out of this, you’re wrong, because you have a lousy view of history,” Kellogg said, arguing Russia was evidently “willing to lose” large numbers of soldiers in the Battle of Stalingrad during World War II, as well as “sacrifice hundreds of thousands” of soldiers in its war in Ukraine.

Some context: Top Trump administration officials will meet with Russian counterparts for Ukraine peace talks in the coming days, a source told CNN, as uncertainty grows among allies about the US approach to ending Russia’s war.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has voiced concerns at the security conference this weekend about the level of US support for Europe — and President Donald Trump’s conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Vivek Ramaswamy is pictured in Washington, DC, on December 5.

Vivek Ramaswamy, who campaigned for President Donald Trump in 2024 and played a role in the early stages of his federal government overhaul, will launch a campaign for Ohio governor in Cincinnati on February 24, according to a source familiar with his plans.

Ramaswamy filed preliminary paperwork with the Ohio secretary of state’s office for a run for governor on Friday, designating a treasurer for a campaign committee.

Ramaswamy will make additional stops in Ohio for his announcement tour, including in the cities of New Albany, Toledo and Strongsville.

Remember: The former biotech entrepreneur and 2024 Republican presidential candidate was once tapped to help lead the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency alongside Elon Musk, though Ramaswamy stopped his work last month with DOGE to prepare for a run for governor.

He was also privately encouraged by Trump to consider an appointment to the US Senate seat for Ohio after it was vacated by Vice President JD Vance. A source familiar with those discussions at the time said Ramaswamy’s preference would be to focus on his role with DOGE and to run for Ohio governor in 2026.

CNN’s Aaron Pellish and David Wright contributed to this report.

National security adviser Mike Waltz, left, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

Top Trump administration officials are set to meet with senior Russian officials to begin talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine, according to multiple sources.

National security adviser Mike Waltz, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff are expected to travel to Saudi Arabia for the meeting with senior Russian officials, two sources familiar with the plans tell CNN.

One of the sources said the meeting will take place in the coming days.

The sources declined to say which Russian officials would be in attendance, but CNN has previously reported the Kremlin is assembling a high-level negotiating team to engage in direct talks with the US, including top-level political, intelligence and economic figures, and Kirill Dmitriev, the Russian official who played a key behind-the-scenes role in a recent US prisoner release deal.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Mike McCaul also confirmed the plans during an interview with Politico at the Munich Security Conference, saying, “Rubio and Waltz and Witkoff (are) being dispatched to Saudi to talk to the Ukrainians and the Russians about Ukraine.”

The State Department had previously announced Rubio would travel to Saudi Arabia in the coming days as part of a larger trip to Munich and the Middle East. He is due to land in Israel on Saturday.

President Donald Trump indicated earlier this week that he could meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Saudi Arabia in the “not too distant future,” but cautioned that no formal decision had been made.

Key context: The conference in Munich has been steeped in uncertainty about how the Trump administration will approach ending the war in Ukraine. A phone call between Trump and Putin this week raised fears that Kyiv was being frozen out of the negotiations, and Trump’s envoy for the conflict said today that European negotiators will not be involved in the talks.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday that a Trump-Putin meeting that takes place before Zelensky can sit down with the US president could be “dangerous.”

Also today: Rubio had a phone call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Saturday.

The Russian foreign ministry said the call was held “at the initiative of the American side.” Both the ministry and US State Department issued statements describing the conversation as a follow-up to the Trump-Putin call, and said it included discussion of their commitment to working toward a resolution to the conflict in Ukraine.

CNN’s Mariya Knight contributed reporting to this post.

This post has been updated with additional details on the talks.

Keith Kellogg, the Trump administration’s envoy for Ukraine and Russia, is pictured during a meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, on Saturday.

European officials will not be at the table when trying to negotiate a solution to the war in Ukraine, the Trump administration’s Russia-Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg said on Saturday.

“The answer is no,” Kellogg said at an event on the margins of the Munich Security Conference.

“I think that’s not going to happen,” added Kellogg, in response to a reporter’s question about whether Ukrainians and Europeans would be at the table together directly.

Kellog said Ukrainian negotiators will “of course” be in attendance.

Positions from Europe will still be taken into consideration, the retired US general said, adding that that’s one of the reasons he is in Munich — to make sure European stances are understood.

The big picture: Kellogg’s comment comes at a time of great uncertainty and concern on the continent over US President Donald Trump’s approach to ending Russia’s war.

A phone call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin this week has been viewed as a potential turning point in US-European relations, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday in Munich that the days of guaranteed US support for Europe are over.

Envoy invokes past deal: Kellogg said he comes from a “school of realism,” and looking back at the previous Minsk-2 agreement, “there was a lot of people at the table that really had no ability to execute some type of peace process, and it failed miserably.”

The Minsk-2 agreement was negotiated in the Belarusian capital in 2015 in a bid to end the bloody 10-month Donbas war in eastern Ukraine. This rare diplomatic effort brought together leaders from Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France, aiming to restore peace in regions seized by pro-Russian separatists in 2014. Despite its ambitious goals, the agreement faced challenges in implementation, ultimately failing to bring lasting stability to the region.

Sen. Chris Coons speaks at a summit in New York in September 2024.

The Trump administration’s freezing of foreign aid is “immoral,” “illegal,” and “quite likely irreversible,” Democratic Sen. Chris Coons said during a Politico event at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.

The shuttering of the US Agency for International Development — the government agency responsible for much of the country’s foreign aid — without consulting Congress was unlawful, Coons claimed. He said he co-authored a 2024 bill that “specifically says you cannot restructure, reorganize, defund USAID without advance consultation with Congress.”

The full dismantling of USAID is currently paused due to an ongoing legal challenge — one of the mounting court cases testing Trump’s executive power to overhaul the federal government.

Coons said the funding freeze could be tough to reverse despite the many lawsuits Democrats have filed, because even if funding is restored, it may not be quickly enough to prevent the shuttering of organizations the aid supported.

Coons said the administration’s replacements for the previous aid programs are inadequate.

“(Secretary of State Marco) Rubio has begun signing lots of humanitarian waivers — they’re not effective,” he said. “The money isn’t flowing. The programs aren’t being restarted, and literally 10s of 1,000s of US headquarter staff and foreign national staff for all the groups I just mentioned are being laid off.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.

Ukraine’s president warned at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday that the days of guaranteed US support for Europe are over.

Volodymyr Zelensky spoke in a week when a phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US counterpart Donald Trump raised fears in Kyiv that it was being frozen out of negotiations on the war in Ukraine, with the White House also downplaying the prospects of Kyiv joining NATO.

Speaking to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on stage at the security conference, Zelensky conceded he was “not happy” that Trump’s first call was with Putin.

The Ukrainian leader spoke the day after US Vice President JD Vance eviscerated America’s European allies at the conference, in a speech that barely touched on the war started by Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Catch up on Vance’s speech here.

Here’s more of the latest from Munich:

Top Democrat slams Vance’s speech: Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said during an interview with Politico that the vice president’s remarks did not speak for the majority of Americans. Warner said US partnership with Europe is “critical” to long-term security for the US, and that Russia would view Vance’s posture as favorable for its interests. He also said the vice president underestimated “the power of misinformation and disinformation” when Vance criticized what he characterized as a crackdown on free speech in Europe.

“NATO backstop”: In an interview with Politico, Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the US and its partners should threaten to put NATO membership for Ukraine “back on the table” if Russia invades the country again in the future, with that threat serving as a “backstop” to deter such an action. McCaul said he had raised the idea to Zelensky and “he likes it.”

Pressed on whether he disagreed with elements of Vance’s speech yesterday, the Texas lawmaker said it was important that America’s European allies know “we have their back.”

He also said he’d personally avoid meddling in another country’s politics, when asked about the US vice president’s controversial meeting with the co-leader of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party. “I don’t know what the goal was there. I mean, I’ll let him speak to that,” McCaul said of Vance.

This post has been updated with additional comments from the conference.

President Donald Trump made an unscheduled stop to Palm Beach International Airport Saturday, where he is touring a new Boeing plane and taking aim at the beleaguered manufacturer.

Boeing has been working toward renovating two 747 jets into next-generation Air Force One aircraft, but the process has been wracked by delays. The plans had been scheduled to be delivered by 2022 and now aren’t expected until at least 2027, according to reports.

Supply chain issues and Covid-19 pandemic-era staffing shortages have contributed to the delays.

In a statement, White House communications director Steven Cheung noted “the project’s failure to deliver a new Air Force One on time as promised, as they are already 5 years late.”

CNN previously reported that Elon Musk, who oversees Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, visited Boeing and met with its CEO Kelly Ortberg in December. Musk has been subsequently working with Boeing, Ortberg said in a January interview.

Trump has previously also sought to make cosmetic changes to the presidential aircraft. He told CNN in January that he would like to change the colors of Air Force One after plans made during his first term were scrapped during the Biden administration.

Changing the exterior colors, Trump told reporters during a flight on Air Force One, would be “very much more appropriate.”

“We want power blue, not baby blue. But no — you know, this is nice. Everything has its time and place. We’ll be changing the colors,” Trump said.

The National Archives building in Washington, DC in 2023.

The Trump administration is forcing out senior leadership at the National Archives and Records Administration in a major shake-up, according to a source familiar with the move.

President Donald Trump has been highly critical of the archives since the agency asked the Department of Justice to investigate Trump’s mishandling of classified documents after he left office.

Following the dismissal of Archivist Colleen Shogan last week, Trump officials made it clear to agency staff that the White House wanted to remove the leadership team and replace top officials with Trump loyalists, according to the source.

The first notice to staff came in an email Friday from Deputy Archivist William J. Bosanko, who told members of his team that he was retiring and that it had been “a privilege and an honor to work” at the archives for the last 32 years.

Bosanko, who has been acting Archivist since Shogan was fired by the White House, is a well-liked and respected figure at NARA. His colleagues credit Bosanko with keeping the agency nonpartisan, and a former senior official described him as “a consummate professional” who was “dedicated to the preservation of historic documents.”

In addition to Bosanko, five other senior officials are also expected to resign, according to the source.

The White House is expected to announce plans for new leadership at the National Archives in the coming days.

CNN has reached out to the National Archives and the White House for comment.

Some context: The role of the National Archives took on new prominence in recent years in the wake of the FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort as part of an investigation into the mishandling of presidential documents, including highly sensitive classified documents.

The exodus of senior staff is seen as a huge loss for the agency, which is considered nonpartisan and dedicated to the preservation of history and documents.

President Donald Trump speaks to the media in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on Friday.

National Press Club President Mike Balsamo criticized the White House Friday evening for barring the Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One.

The decision comes in response to the AP continuing to use the name “Gulf of Mexico” for its global audience, while noting to readers that President Donald Trump has announced the renaming of the body of water to “Gulf of America” in the US via an executive order.

“Today’s actions represent a dangerous escalation of government interference in journalism and a direct threat to the public’s right to independent, fact-based information.”

AP journalists are still credentialed to enter the White House grounds, per a Friday X post from deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich. But the decision prevents the AP from being part of Trump’s travel pool. The White House Correspondents Association deemed the move a “textbook violation” of the First Amendment in a statement on Thursday.

Keep in mind: The AP is one of the world’s largest news agencies, publishing journalism on its own platforms while also distributing its reporting as a wire service for major and regional publications. It has played a formative role in the way media covers the White House.

CNN’s Brian Stelter contributed to this report.