The Kremlin confirmed on Monday that Russian President Vladimir Putin would talk to U.S. President Donald Trump by phone on Tuesday.
“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One during a flight back to the Washington area from Florida on Sunday night. “Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.”
Asked about the planned call, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed it was planned for Tuesday.
Trump on the presidential plane said there had been positive talks between Steve Witkoff, his special envoy, and Putin in Moscow.
Trump is trying to win Putin’s support for a 30-day ceasefire proposal that Ukraine accepted last week, as both sides continued trading heavy aerial strikes through the weekend and Russia moved closer to ejecting Ukrainian forces from their months-old foothold in the western Russian region of Kursk.
When asked about what concessions are being considered in ceasefire negotiations, Trump said: “We’ll be talking about land. We’ll be talking about power plants … We’re already talking about that, dividing up certain assets.”
Trump did not elaborate but was most likely referring to the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia facility in Ukraine, Europe’s largest nuclear plant. Russia and Ukraine have accused each other of risking an accident at the plant with their actions.
When asked about those remarks, the Kremlin said it did not think it appropriate to comment on upcoming discussions between two presidents.
Territory, security guarantees among the issues
In separate appearances on Sunday TV shows in the United States, Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz emphasized that there were still challenges to be worked out before Russia agrees to a ceasefire, much less a final peaceful resolution to the war.
Asked on ABC whether the U.S. would accept a peace deal in which Russia was allowed to keep stretches of eastern Ukraine that it has seized, Waltz replied, “Are we going to drive every Russian off of every inch of Ukrainian soil?” He added that the negotiations had to be grounded in “reality.”
Nine hours of talks Tuesday between American, Ukrainian and Saudi Arabian government officials resulted in Ukraine agreeing to a U.S. proposal for a 30-day ceasefire. Ukrainian Ambassador to Canada Yuliya Kovaliv says it’s ‘now up to Russia.’
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has consistently said the sovereignty of his country is not negotiable and that Russia must surrender the territory it has seized. Russia seized the Crimea peninsula in 2014 and now controls most of four eastern Ukrainian regions since it invaded the country in 2022.
Russia will seek “ironclad” guarantees in any peace deal that NATO nations exclude Kyiv from membership and that Ukraine will remain neutral, a Russian deputy foreign minister said in remarks published on Monday.
In an interview with the Russian media outlet Izvestia that made no reference to the ceasefire proposal, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said that any long-lasting peace treaty on Ukraine must meet Moscow’s demands.
“We will demand that ironclad security guarantees become part of this agreement,” Izvestia cited Grushko as saying.
“Part of these guarantees should be the neutral status of Ukraine, the refusal of NATO countries to accept it into the alliance.”
Ukraine says Russia launches more than 170 drones
Putin has said his military incursion into Ukraine was because NATO’s creeping expansion threatened Russia’s security. He has demanded that Ukraine drop its NATO ambitions, that Russia keeps control of all Ukrainian territory seized, and that the size of the Ukrainian army be limited. He also wants Western sanctions eased and a presidential election in Ukraine, which Kyiv says is premature while martial law is in force.
The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said on Monday that the conditions demanded by Russia to agree to a ceasefire showed that Moscow does not really want peace.
Trump, who has upended American policy by shifting closer to Moscow, surprised European allies last month by revealing that he spoke to Putin by phone and was sending diplomats to meet with Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia, to the exclusion of Ukrainian officials.
Days later, he and U.S. Vice-President J.D. Vance berated Zelenskyy in an Oval Office meeting in Washington last month that ended with the Ukrainian leader leaving the White House early.
In fresh fighting Monday, Ukraine’s air defence units shot down 90 of 174 drones launched by Russia in an overnight attack on Monday, the Ukrainian air force said.
It said 70 drones were lost, referring to the Ukrainian military using electronic warfare to redirect them.
“Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Kirovohrad, Sumy, Chernihiv and Kyiv regions were affected by the Russian attack,” the military said on the Telegram messenger app.
One civilian was injured during the attack, which damaged a kindergarten, a private residential house, a shop and a passenger car, Odesa Governor Oleh Kiper said on Telegram.
