(March 23): US President Donald Trump said efforts to stop the war between Russia and Ukraine from escalating further are “under control.”

Trump cited his “good” relationships with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as key to negotiating an end to the war. He was speaking in an interview with Outkick, a website that combines sports talk with conservative politics and which is owned by Fox Corp.

“It would be a great thing to be able to stop it,” Trump said in the interview aboard Air Force One on Saturday. “I will say this, nobody else would have been able to. Nobody. Zero.”

Trump and Putin spoke in a call on March 18 where the Russian leader said he’d be willing to limit attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure as a first step but didn’t agree to the full ceasefire that the US was pushing. A day later, Zelenskiy agreed in a call with Trump to a proposal for a mutual halt to strikes on energy assets.

Trump said he knows Putin “very well.”

Putin “didn’t invade anything when I was president. He took Crimea, and he took Georgia, when Bush was president, when Obama was president, and he’s trying to take the whole thing,” Trump said. “I don’t think there’s anybody in the world that could’ve stopped him except me, and I think, I hope I’m going to be able to stop him.”

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