United States President Donald Trump delivered a resolute message to Tehran on Thursday, declaring that from Washington’s perspective, the prospect of reaching a diplomatic agreement with Iran is no longer on the table.
“We don’t need a deal with Iran,” Trump declared in a statement on Truth Social.“Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, hundreds of billions of dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!”
In the same statement, the president indicated he had instructed Vice President JD Vance—who had been linked in recent reports to potential preliminary contacts with Iranian officials—to focus his full attention on domestic anti-fraud and anti-corruption efforts rather than negotiations with Tehran.
Global crude oil prices swiftly reversed earlier losses after Trump’s remarks, underscoring the market’s sensitivity to Washington’s posture toward the Persian Gulf.Even as Trump closed the door on diplomatic concessions to the Iranian regime, the administration’s intensive diplomatic campaign to end the Russia-Ukraine war continued at full pace in Moscow.
While Trump issued his warning to Tehran, his special envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, convened with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in an effort to advance negotiations aimed at terminating the conflict in Ukraine, which has now dragged on for more than four and a half years.
The Kremlin summit—attended on the Russian side by senior Putin aides Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Medinsky, and Kirill Dmitriev—follows two days of closed-door trilateral negotiations in Abu Dhabi between delegations from the United States, Russia, and Ukraine.
During the Abu Dhabi rounds, negotiators achieved tangible progress on humanitarian frameworks and upcoming prisoner-of-war exchanges.However, the delegations failed to bridge the core strategic disputes blocking a comprehensive ceasefire—chiefly Moscow’s sweeping territorial demands and Kyiv’s insistence on binding, long-term Western security guarantees.
Following their talks with Putin in Moscow, Witkoff and Kushner are scheduled to travel directly to Dublin to debrief Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the Kremlin’s response.