German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had one main request of President Donald Trump during his Oval Office visit on Thursday: that the American president stand with Europe in pressuring Moscow to back down from attacks on Ukraine and push to end the three-year war.

To which Trump replied: Maybe they need to fight a little longer.

“Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office as Merz looked on, stone faced. “They hate each other, and they’re fighting in a park, and you try and pull them apart. They don’t want to be pulled. Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.”

It was the latest pivot conflict that he once said confidently that he would end.

On Thursday, however, he compared the Russia-Ukraine war to a hockey game, where referees sometimes allow players to drop gloves and brawl on the ice — an observation he said he had also made earlier in the week in a private phone call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. “I gave that analogy to Putin yesterday,” he added. “I said, ‘President, maybe you’re going to have to keep fighting and suffering a lot, because both sides are suffering, before you pull them apart, before they’re able to be pulled apart.’”

Trump’s posture comes at a moment that German officials say could be decisive for Ukraine’s chances of forging peace on favorable terms.

Merz had come to Washington hoping to persuade Trump to play a more active role in defending Ukraine, bringing unrivaled U.S. power to the task of forcing Russia to end its invasion of its smaller neighbor.

The German leader told reporters in the Oval Office that both he and Trump favored stopping the war soon. “And I told the president before we came in,” he said, “that he is the key person in the world who can really do that now by putting pressure on Russia.”

But Trump made no promises of such pressure, and he made no concrete commitments to provide weapons or back sanctions, either publicly or privately with Merz. The closest he came was in response to a question about if and when he might favor new financial penalties on Russia, as European leaders, including Merz, have proposed. Trump said he had a deadline “in my brain” for when he might favor such a move.

He also suggested that Ukraine, the victim of Russian aggression, might come in for financial punishment. “We’ll be very, very, very tough, and it could be on both countries, to be honest,” Trump said. “You know, it takes two to tango.”

Aides say that Trump is exasperated with both presidents in the conflict, but often more so with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine. Trump has told his advisers that Zelenskyy is a “bad guy” who is edging the world to the precipice of nuclear war. But Trump has also told aides that it is understandable that Zelenskyy is fighting back, given he is in a war against an enemy that seems determined to keep bombing Ukrainian cities.