Obama’s Ambassador to Russia Praises Trump For Making ‘Major Progress’ On Ukraine

Michael McFaul, U.S. ambassador to Russia under former President Barack Obama, offered a complete turnaround on his criticism of Donald Trump’s attempts to broker a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.

McFaul told NBC News on Monday that he thought Trump’s White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders was “very positive.”

“Whoever had the idea to bring all these European leaders together in addition to President Zelensky, that was a brilliant, brilliant idea,” McFaul said. “And having it come so quickly after Alaska was also very important, because now they’ve changed the talking points here. Just in this meeting alone, they’ve walked back some of the positions that the president was echoing when he met with President Putin.”

Following Trump’s Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin just days ago, McFaul expressed his shock at the lack of details that came out. Trump admitted that while “many points were agreed to,” no agreement had been reached, causing McFaul to exclaim on MSNBC, “No details, absolutely no details.”

“The word that jumped out to me in the translation — and I want to emphasize that — when Putin was speaking, was the word ‘agreement.’” McFaul said Friday, “‘We had an agreement.’ President Trump didn’t underscore that. So we don’t know if there was any agreement at all.”

But on Monday, McFaul called the White House meeting “very positive progress, the fact that they’re talking about a ceasefire again.”

“There’s no logic —I want to underscore this —this idea that a ceasefire gets in the way of negotiations. That’s not historically true,” McFaul said. “And why should people continue to die while they’re negotiating? So, I’m glad that’s back on the table.”

McFaul said the second most important thing to come out of the White House meeting was that “talking about security guarantees with European soldiers being a part of that — That is major progress — with American assistance — I, myself, would like NATO guarantees rather than NATO-like guarantees. But if you have to compromise, I think this is an important compromise and a step forward.”

Watch the clip above via NBC.