President Donald Trump said Thursday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is ready to negotiate a deal to end the war with Russia, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin would like to meet soon.

Trump spoke to reporters after signing multiple executive orders Thursday afternoon in the Oval Office. When a reporter asked if Zelenskyy told him he was ready to negotiate a solution to the war with Russia, Trump provided confirmation.

‘Yes, he’s ready to negotiate a deal. He’d like to stop this,’ Trump said. ‘He’s somebody that lost a lot of soldiers, and so did Russia. … Russia lost more soldiers. They lost 800,000. Would you say that’s a lot? I’d say it’s a lot.’

He was also asked if sanctions on Russia would force Putin to negotiate.

‘I don’t know, but I think he should make a deal,’ Trump said.

Trump also told reporters Chinese President Xi Jinping could have an influence on the war between Russia and Ukraine since it has power over Russia. He explained that the two countries are big trading partners. 

Russia, Trump noted, supplies China with a lot of energy, and the latter pays the former a lot of money.

‘I think they have a lot of power over Russia, so I think Russia should want to make a deal,’ Trump said. ‘From what I hear, Putin would like to see me, and we’ll meet as soon as we can.’

When he described the war in Ukraine, Trump said soldiers were being killed on a battlefield that ‘is like no battlefield since World War II.’

‘Soldiers are being killed on a daily basis at numbers that we haven’t seen in decades,’ he said. ‘It would be nice to end that war. It’s a ridiculous war.’

Putin is reportedly worried about the state of his country’s economy as Trump returns to the Oval Office. According to a Reuters report citing various sources, Trump’s push to end the war in Ukraine is only adding to Putin’s concerns.

Throughout his campaign, Trump pushed to end world conflicts, including the Russia-Ukraine war, which began with Putin’s 2022 invasion.

Last month, Putin said he was ready to compromise over Ukraine in possible talks with Trump on ending the war and had no conditions for starting talks with Ukrainian authorities.

‘We have always said that we are ready for negotiations and compromises,’ Putin said at the time, after saying that Russian forces, advancing across the entire front, were moving toward achieving their primary goals in Ukraine.

‘In my opinion, soon there will be no one left who wants to fight. We are ready, but the other side needs to be ready for both negotiations and compromises.’

Fox News Digital’s Rachel Wolf contributed to this report.

A federal judge in Seattle on Thursday temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order banning birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants, describing the action as ‘blatantly unconstitutional.’

The decision by U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee, comes in response to four U.S. states — Arizona, Illinois, Oregon and Washington — who sued to block Trump’s executive order, which was signed by Trump shortly after being sworn in as president. 

Coughenour said Thursday that the executive order banning birthright citizenship ‘boggles the mind,’ and told the court he could not remember in his more than 40 years on the bench seeing a case so ‘blatantly unconstitutional.’

The 14-day restraining order granted by Coughenour will apply to the entire U.S. 

The ruling is a blow to the new Trump administration, and comes as 22 U.S. states and immigrants rights groups have sued the Trump administration over the ban on birthright citizenship, arguing in court filings that the executive order is both unconstitutional and ‘unprecedented.’

Trump’s ban is slated to come into force Feb. 19, and would impact the hundreds of thousands of children born in the U.S. annually.

Trump’s order seeks to clarify the 14th Amendment, which states: ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.’

It clarifies that those born to illegal immigrant parents, or those who were here legally but on temporary nonimmigrant visas, are not citizens by birthright.

The U.S. is one of roughly 30 countries where birthright citizenship is applied. 

States who have challenged the law have argued that the 14th Amendment does in fact guarantee citizenship to persons born on U.S. soil and naturalized in the U.S. 

 This is a breaking news story, more updates to come.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he supports the delay of all of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees who do not have unanimous support in the Senate.

Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., filed cloture on John Ratcliffe’s nomination for CIA director, Kristi Noem’s nomination for Homeland Security secretary and Pete Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary on Tuesday. But a last-minute objection from Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., held up a vote on Ratcliffe, triggering hours of debate that could delay confirmation votes on Trump’s national security nominees late into the week and possibly into the weekend.

‘I don’t think it’s too much to ask to make sure that we have a full, real debate that lasts two days on the Senate floor,’ Murphy said on the Senate floor, adding that Democrats have ‘serious concerns’ about Trump’s CIA pick. 

The Senate voted to confirm Ratcliffe, 74-25, on Thursday afternoon. 

Asked on Thursday if he supports slowing the confirmation process for Trump’s nominees down, Schumer indicated that he does.

‘Look, there are some nominees like [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio that got broad support, but a detailed discussion – I have some doubts about Mr. Ratcliffe, particularly when I asked him how he’d react if Tulsi Gabbard were put in charge of him in the DNI,’ Schumer said, referring to Trump’s pick to lead the Office of National Intelligence. 

‘For a day or two, or a few hours to examine these nominees who have such power thoroughly, absolutely,’ he added. ‘Our idea is to let the whole truth come out if they try to rush them through. We don’t want that to happen.’ 

Thune on Tuesday expressed frustration with Democrats over their delay tactics.

‘Do we want a vote on these folks on Tuesday or vote on them on Friday, Saturday and Sunday? Because that’s what we’re going to do. This can be easy or this can be hard,’ Thune said. ‘This is about America’s national security interests, and we’re stalling, so that’s not going to happen.’

Ratcliffe was approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee by a bipartisan vote of 14-3. Because of that, Thune said the vote to confirm him ‘shouldn’t be hard.’

‘Democrats and Republicans, in a very big bipartisan fashion, agree that he is very qualified for this job,’ Thune said, adding that he isn’t sure what stalling accomplishes.

Fox News Digital’s Elizabeth Pritchett contributed to this report.

A top national trade organization has sent letters to three departments in the Trump administration advocating for specific policies that the group believes will most effectively achieve President Trump’s goal to ‘unleash American energy’ in the United States. 

The American Exploration & Production Council, a national trade association representing the leading independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies in the United States, sent letters to the Department of Energy, Department of Interior and Environmental Protection Agency with specific guidelines on how to best jumpstart energy production.

In the letter to the Department of Energy, AXPC made several requests, including that the department ‘resume timely approval of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export approvals.’

‘U.S. LNG plays a critical role in geopolitical stability and supporting global emission reductions — a fact that has been confirmed numerous times over the past decade,’ the letter states. ‘As the world’s largest natural gas producer, the U.S. is well positioned to meet the dual challenge of supplying the world with affordable, clean, and reliable energy all while reducing global emissions. This misguided permitting pause should be lifted immediately, and DOE should ensure that any public interest study uses well-reasoned assumptions.’

Other recommendations to DOE included promoting U.S. energy exports, creating fair access to export authorizations and avoiding unnecessary delays, providing greater certainty for critical energy and infrastructure, and enhancing energy reliability with advanced natural gas storage.

‘Our recommendations focus on policy priorities and actions within the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and some Department wide that we believe strike this critical balance and directly impact responsible onshore exploration, development, and production of oil and natural gas in the United States,’ the letter to the Department of Interior explained. 

‘In alignment with the Trump administration’s goal to ‘Unleash American Energy’, including expanding oil and natural gas production on federal lands, these recommendations aim to support responsible American energy production while maintaining crucial environmental protections and fostering economic growth here at home.’

Recommendations to the DOI include revoking the BLM’s Conservation & Landscape Health Rule and its implementing instructional memorandums, streamlining drilling permits, replacing the recent resources management plan amendments to align with western states’ priorities, and allowing for the commingling of oil and gas production for greater efficiency and environmental protection. 

In the letter to the EPA, AXPC wrote that its recommendations ‘focus on policy priorities that we believe strike this critical balance and directly impact responsible onshore exploration, development, and production of oil and natural gas in the United States.’

Some of those recommendations include revising the source performance standards to ‘improve feasibility for emission controls’ and ‘provide greater allowance for alternative technologies and approaches.’

The letter also calls for reforms to the Clean Water Act and modifications to the Greenhouse Gas reporting rule. 

‘America is stronger, the world is safer, and the environment is cleaner when the United States is the world leader in energy production, and that is best achieved with sensible, workable, and durable policies out of Washington,’ AXPC CEO Anne Bradbury told Fox News Digital in a statement. 

 ‘That’s why America’s oil and natural gas producers look forward to working with the Trump administration’s goal of energy dominance and providing affordable, reliable, and ever-cleaner energy for the American people.’

Trump’s nominees in all three departments have signaled that they intend to implement new policies and guidelines that significantly increase oil and gas production while easing regulations at the same time. 

‘When energy production is restricted in America, it doesn’t reduce demand. It just shifts production to countries like Russia and Iran, whose autocratic leaders not only don’t care at all about the environment, but they use their revenues from energy sales to fund wars against us and our allies,’ DOI secretary nominee Doug Burgum said in his opening statement at his confirmation hearing. 

‘President Trump’s energy dominance vision will end those wars abroad and will make life more affordable for every family in America by driving down inflation. And President Trump will achieve those goals while championing clean air, clean water and protecting our beautiful lands.’

If President Donald Trump’s personnel moves are any tell, he may come out of the gate toward Iran with a tone that is more diplomatic than combative. 

And Trump on Thursday evening suggested he was open to a nuclear deal with Iran.

Asked if he would support Israel striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, Trump told reporters, ‘We’ll have to see. I’m going to be meeting with various people over the next couple of days. We’ll see, but hopefully that could be worked out without having to worry about it.’

‘Iran hopefully will make a deal. I mean, they don’t make a deal, I guess that’s OK, too.’

Iran, at least, is hoping for just that. The Tehran Times, a regime-linked English language newspaper, questioned in a recent article whether the firing of Brian Hook, the architect of the ‘maximum pressure’ policy on Iran during Trump’s first term, could ‘signal a change in [Trump’s] Iran policy.’

In November, news outlets reported that Hook was running the transition at the State Department. But Hook was relieved from the transition team shortly after in December, sources familiar with the move confirmed to Fox News Digital. 

This week, Trump knocked Hook back a step further by posting on social media that he’d be removed from his position at a U.S. government-owned think tank.

‘Brian Hook from the Wilson Center for Scholars… YOU’RE FIRED!’ Trump wrote on Truth Social.

And after taking office, Trump removed the government-sponsored security details of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a source familiar confirmed to Fox News Digital. 

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton told CNN his detail was also pulled, as was Hook’s.

‘You can’t have [protection] for the rest of your life. Do you want to have a large deal of people guarding people for the rest of their lives? I mean, there’s risks to everything,’ Trump said.

Trump recently put his Middle East envoy, Steven Witkoff, in charge of addressing U.S. concerns about Iran, according to a Financial Times report.

Witkoff most recently helped seal negotiations on a ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel, suggesting he may test Iran’s willingness to engage at the negotiating table on nuclear issues before ramping up pressure, sources told the Financial Times. 

Experts warn that Iran is enriching hundreds of pounds of uranium to the 60% purity threshold, shy of the 90% purity levels needed to develop a nuclear bomb.

At the same time, the president hired Michael Dimino as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, a foreign policy expert who has said the Middle East doesn’t ‘really matter’ to U.S. interests any longer. 

Dimino is cut from the same cloth as undersecretary of defense for policy Elbridge Colby, who has argued for the U.S. to focus military resources on countering China and devote fewer resources to other regions. 

Dimino, a former expert at the Koch-funded restraint advocacy think tank Defense Priorities, has strongly advocated for pulling U.S. resources out of the Middle East.

‘The core question is: Does the Middle East still matter?’ Dimino said during a panel last February. ‘The answer is: not really, not really for U.S. interests. What I would say is that vital or existential U.S. interests in the Middle East are best characterized as minimal to non-existent.’

‘We are really there to counter Iran and that is really at the behest of the Israelis and Saudis,’ he added.

‘Iranian power remains both exaggerated and misunderstood. Its economy continues to underperform, and its conventional military is antiquated and untested. Tehran simply doesn’t have the financial capital or hard power capabilities to dominate the Middle East or directly threaten core U.S. interests,’ he wrote in a 2023 article.

Dimino has also argued the U.S. does not need to focus resources on an offensive campaign against the Houthis amid attacks on shipping lanes in the Red Sea. 

‘Put simply, there are no existential or vital U.S. national interests at stake in Yemen and very little is at stake for the U.S. economically in the Red Sea.’

Instead, he argued in a 2023 op-ed that working to increase aid into Gaza would rid the Houthis of their stated reason for their attacks in the Red Sea, which they’ve said are a means of fighting on behalf of Gaza.

‘Working to increase aid shipments to Gaza would not just help to alleviate the humanitarian crisis there but would deprive the Houthis of their claimed justification for attacks in the Red Sea and provide the group with an off-ramp for de-escalation that would also serve to prevent indefinite U.S. participation in a broader regional war.’

Others in Trump’s foreign policy orbit historically have struck a more hawkish tone toward Iran, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Israel Ambassador Mike Huckabee. 

Rubio has already said he will work to bring back the snapback sanctions that were suspended in the 2015 Iran deal, as indicated by written responses he provided to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. 

‘A policy of maximum pressure must be reinstated, and it must be reinstated with the help of the rest of the globe, and that includes standing with the Iranian people and their aspirations for democracy,’ Gen. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s envoy to Russia and Ukraine, recently said. 

The Dimino hiring – along with other recent personnel moves – has caused rumblings from prominent Iran hawks. 

Mark Levin, a radio host who has the ear of Trump, has posted on X multiple times in opposition to Dimino: ‘How’d this creep get a top DoD position?’ he asked in one post. 

‘While Dimino and Witkoff are very different issues, Witkoff is Trump’s best friend, [it] seems difficult to detangle, very concerning,’ said one Iran expert. ‘Dimino is a mystery and does not align with Hegseth or Trump values on Iran or Israel.’

‘There is an ongoing coordinated effort by Iran’s regime and its lobby network in the West to cause divisions in President Trump’s administration over policy towards Tehran,’ Kasra Aarabi, director of research on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard at the group United Against a Nuclear Iran, told Fox News Digital. 

‘Having spent the past four years trying – and failing – to assassinate President Trump, the ayatollah has now instructed his propagandists to cause fissures between President Trump and his advisors so as to weaken the new administration’s policy towards [the] Islamist regime.’

Aarabi warned, ‘In the past 48 hours, Ayatollah Khamenei-run entities in Iran’s regime – such as the ‘Islamic Propaganda Organization’ – have been celebrating certain appointments across the broader administration in the same way as they praised some of former president Biden’s appointments.’

One of President Donald Trump’s top congressional allies introduced a resolution on Thursday evening to allow the commander-in-chief a third term.

Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., is pushing a new amendment to the Constitution that would give a president three terms in office, but no more than two consecutive four-year stints.

The amendment would say, ‘No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than three times, nor be elected to any additional term after being elected to two consecutive terms, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.’

The 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, prevents a person from serving as president for more than two terms. 

It was passed by Congress in 1947 in response to Franklin Delano Roosevelt winning four terms in the White House. Roosevelt died the year after he was elected to his fourth term in the 1944 presidential election.

But in a statement released to media on Thursday, Ogles said Trump ‘has proven himself to be the only figure in modern history capable of reversing our nation’s decay and restoring America to greatness, and he must be given the time necessary to accomplish that goal.’

‘To that end, I am proposing an amendment to the Constitution to revise the limitations imposed by the 22nd Amendment on presidential terms,’ Ogles said. ‘This amendment would allow President Trump to serve three terms, ensuring that we can sustain the bold leadership our nation so desperately needs.’

Trump made comments about serving a third term to House Republicans during a closed-door speech late last year, but multiple sources who attended the event told Fox News Digital that the then-president-elect was joking.

Earlier this month, Ogles unveiled a bill to authorize Trump to enter into talks to purchase Greenland after he expressed interest in doing so.

The ‘Make Greenland Great Again Act’ would have authorized Trump to enter negotiations with Denmark over purchasing Greenland, a territory located in North America but with longstanding cultural and geopolitical ties to Europe.

‘Joe Biden took a blowtorch to our reputation these past four years, and before even taking office, President Trump is telling the world that America First is back. American economic and security interests will no longer take a backseat, and House Republicans are ready to help President Trump deliver for the American people,’ Ogles told Fox News Digital at the time.