President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have concluded a phone call during which the two leaders discussed efforts to bring an end to the unprovoked war Putin started by ordering the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
A White House official said the call ended roughly two hours after it began on Monday.
Russian state media reported that Putin described the call as “informative and useful” and stated Moscow was ready to work with Ukraine on a memorandum about future peace talks.
The state-run news agency RIA Novosti quoted Putin as saying: “We are generally on the right track.”
A readout of the call from the American government was not immediately available.
Trump had previously said his discussion with Mr Putin would focus on stopping the “bloodbath” of the war as well as potential trade issues with the latter topic being sign that the American president might be seeking to use financial incentives to broker some kind of agreement after Russia’s invasion led to severe sanctions by the US and its allies that have steadily eroded Moscow’s economy.
The American and Russian leaders have spoken by phone several times since Trump returned to the White House for the start of his second term in January.
The first publicly announced telephone call them was on February 12, just weeks after Trump’s inauguration.
At the time, Trump said then that both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had expressed a desire for peace in separate phone calls, and Trump ordered top US officials to begin talks on ending the war in Ukraine.
Their next conversation took place just over a month later on March 18, with the Kremlin stating that they spoke for about 2 hours.
According to readouts of the calls issued by the respective governments, Putin agreed to stop attacking Ukrainian energy facilities temporarily but declined to endorse a full 30-day ceasefire that Trump hoped would be the first step toward a permanent peace deal.
Since then, both Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of breaking that moratorium on attacking energy facilities.
In talks last week in Istanbul, Russian representatives made a series of demands described as unacceptable by Kyiv, including insistences that Ukraine adopt a neutral position with no foreign troops or weapons of mass destruction on its territory, renounce claims for reparations from Russia for damages caused by them war, and accept Russian annexation of Crimea plus four other parts of eastern Ukraine which Moscow has attempted to seize and annex despite not fully gaining control of them after years of war.
Trump and his aides have grown increasingly frustrated with Putin in recent months as the Russian president has refused to sign on to any of the multiple plans for a ceasefire pushed by the American administration, even as Zelensky has agreed to call off attacks from his forces if Moscow will concur.
Earlier in the day, Vice President JD Vance told reporters traveling with him on the way back to Washington from Rome that administration officials had concluded that there was an “impasse” that needed to be resolved to bring an end to the conflict.
In a brief availability with the press before boarding Air Force Two, he said: “I think the president’s going to say to President Putin: ‘Look, are you serious? Are you real about this?’”
Vance also said Putin “doesn’t quite know how to get out of the war” and stressed that Washington is willing to help bring about an end to the conflict while cautioning that the administration’s patience is not endless.
“It takes two to tango. I know the President’s willing to do that, but if Russia is not willing to do that, then we’re eventually just going to say, this is not our war,” he said. “We’re going to try to end it, but if we can’t end it, we’re eventually going to say: ‘You know what? That was worth a try, but we’re not doing anymore.'”
Separately, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at a morning press briefing that Trump’s goal remains a “ceasefire” that would “see this conflict come to and end” but warned that the American president had “grown weary and frustrated with both sides of the conflict.”
“The president and his team have put an enormous amount of effort into solving this very complicated war that, again, began because of the previous administration’s weakness,” she said.
The American president is understood to have spoken with Zelensky ahead of the call with Putin, though Leavitt had said that Trump would speak with the Ukrainian leader following his call with his Russian counterpart.
