President Donald Trump told reporters on Saturday that he won't meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin again until he knows they can make a deal to end the war in Ukraine, according to the New York Post.

“We’re going to have to know that we’re going to make a deal,” Trump said from Air Force One.

“I’m not going to be wasting my time. I’ve always had a great relationship with [Putin], but this has been very disappointing.”

Trump made it clear that he didn't think it would take as long as it has to end the fighting in Ukraine--something he said during the campaign he would do on "day one" of his return to office.

"It didn't work out that way"

“I thought [the Hamas-Israel cease-fire deal] would have been more difficult than Russia and Ukraine, but it didn’t work out that way,” he said.

The comments followed an announcement last week that after a phone call between Trump and Putin,  Secretary of State Marco Rubio will lead the U.S. delegation in talks with counterparts in Russia.

The phone call was supposed to be a precursor to a face-to-face meeting between Putin and Trump, but that plan fell apart because Putin rejected a key part of the plan put forward by Trump: ending the war with the current battle lines in place.

That would mean that Russia keeps control of Crimea, but only holds parts of other areas where fighting has raged, including the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.

Russia has claimed all of these regions and seeks to annex them all.

Indeed, Putin has spent hundreds of billions of dollars and likely over one million Russian lives to accomplish his goal, and no doubt it would be humiliating for him to end the fighting without accomplishing everything he set out to do.

Where it stands

On the other hand, though, the U.S. and other allies have determined that letting Ukraine fall to Russia is not in the world's best interest.

Putin could realistically say that he has been fighting not just Ukraine, but the entire Western world in the war.

It may yet come to that, since the U.S. is now preparing to give Patriot missiles to Ukraine to stave off the Russian aggression. Trump is also putting new sanctions on Russia's two biggest oil producers, hoping to starve the Russian war machine further.

“There’s a lot of hatred between the two, between [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky and Putin,” Trump told the press corps. “There’s tremendous hatred.”