Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, in a telephone conversation. Collage: Ion Mateș / Hotnews. Photo: Profimedia
US President Donald Trump had a “positive phone call” with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday regarding the war in Ukraine, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Monday.
It is the second Trump-Putin conversation in two days and comes after the marathon negotiations in Florida, where the US president received his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday.
Zelenskiy and Trump spoke for about three hours at Mar-A-Lago (the US president's Florida residence) about the differences that remain in trying to reach a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia to end the war.
At the end of the talks at Mar-A-Lago, Trump announced that he was convinced a peace deal was “close” and called “one or two very thorny issues” that remain to be resolved, in a joint news conference with Zelenski.
Trump also spoke on the phone with Putin before the meeting with Zelenskiy
Shortly before Zelenskiy and his delegation arrived at Trump's Florida residence, he had a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin described as “productive” by the US president and “friendly” by Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov.
Ushakov, who is in Moscow, said Putin told Trump that the 60-day truce proposed by the European Union and Ukraine would prolong the war. The Kremlin adviser also said that Ukraine must make a decision on Donbas “without delay”.
Trump said he and Putin spoke for more than two hours. He said the Russian president had pledged to help rebuild Ukraine, including by providing cheap energy. “Russia wants Ukraine to succeed,” Trump said. “It sounds a little strange,” he added.
Trump said he would call Putin again after the meeting with Zelenskiy.
“The whole world appreciates the peace efforts of President Trump and his team,” Kirill Dmitriev, Putin's special envoy, wrote on the X social network after Trump's meeting with Zelenskiy.
Russia controls all of Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, and since the start of the invasion nearly four years ago has taken control of about 12 percent of its territory, including about 90 percent of Donbas, 75 percent of Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, and small parts of Kharkiv, Sumy, Nikolaev and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
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