For Donald Trump, Monday’s call with Vladimir Putin evoked the hope of a bright future of “largescale TRADE” between Russia and the US, “when this catastrophic ‘bloodbath’ is over”.
Yuri Ushakov, the Russian leader’s foreign policy adviser, said the tone of the two-hour conversation was so friendly that neither president wanted to be the first to put down the phone.
To the Ukrainians and allies in Europe it felt like a betrayal.
It was not only that the US president did not appear to exert any pressure on Russia to achieve a ceasefire. According to his readout of the call, Trump also made clear that the US was bowing out as a mediator in efforts to end the war, leaving Moscow and Kyiv to figure things out themselves.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned of the consequences. “It is crucial for all of us that the United States does not distance itself from the talks and the pursuit of peace, because the only one who benefits from that is Putin,” he said in a statement after speaking with Trump.
For observers, it was a turning point after more than three years of conflict. A president who promised to end the Ukraine war on day one of his second term appeared to be washing his hands of the effort and leaving Ukraine to the mercy of its invader. The call confirmed the Europeans’ worst fears: that the US president, seduced by Putin’s blandishments, was ready to pivot to Moscow and sell out Kyiv.
Trump even had a suggestion for who could replace the US as mediator: Pope Leo XIV. “The Vatican . . . has stated that it would be very interested in hosting negotiations,” he wrote on Truth Social.
In a call to European leaders after he had spoken to Putin, Trump signalled not only that he was disengaging, but that he also did not intend to apply additional pressure on Moscow while the bilateral talks between Russia and Ukraine were under way, according to two people briefed on the conversation.
That represented a volte-face for Trump. Just over a week ago, he had joined other western leaders in threatening to impose new punitive measures on Russia if it failed to implement an immediate ceasefire.
Trump himself admitted to journalists later on Monday that he had not even reiterated his earlier demands of Putin to cease his attacks on civilian areas in Ukraine.
“This call with Trump was a win for Putin,” said Steven Pifer, a former US ambassador to Ukraine now at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. “He made clear a ceasefire won’t happen any time soon, so Russia can continue the war. And still no additional sanctions will be applied.”
Trump and Putin appeared to have agreed that Russia and Ukraine would hold direct talks, continuing the negotiations in Istanbul from last Friday.
Putin said Russia was ready to work with Ukraine on a “memorandum about the possible future peace agreement”. That would include the “principles on which a peace agreement would be based” and a “possible ceasefire for a certain amount of time, if certain agreements are reached”.
Yet there was bafflement about what Putin was talking about.
A senior Ukrainian official familiar with the calls said of the memorandum idea that “nobody knows what it is, what’s the reason for it [and] why it matters”. Zelenskyy himself told reporters late on Monday that the memorandum proposal was “unknown” to him.
“The Russians will conduct low-level conversations, exchange various documents, and meanwhile keep on fighting,” said Bill Taylor, who served as the US ambassador to Ukraine from 2006-09. “How much longer will Trump put up with all this stalling?”
The US desire to disengage has been flagged for weeks, by Trump himself but also by secretary of state Marco Rubio and vice-president JD Vance, who have repeatedly expressed frustration with Russia and Ukraine in equal measure. Vance told reporters on Monday that the US might ultimately have to say: “This is not our war.”
“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 it any more.’”
Trump reiterated that when he told reporters in the White House that something was “going to happen” to end the war. “And if it doesn’t, I just back away and they’re going to have to keep going. This was a European situation, and should have remained a European situation.”
Some experts see Trump’s desire for disengagement as understandable. “Each side’s approach has been to make Trump mad at the other side, and that was destructive in its essence,” said Peter Slezkine of the Stimson Center think-tank. “If he can force the two sides to talk to each other and take himself out of the picture, that might be necessary to get things moving.”
But Trump now seemed more interested in rapprochement with Moscow than in resolving the war, others said.
“At this point Trump seems to see normalisation of Russia-US relations as an end in itself,” said Andrew Weiss, vice-president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Everything else is subordinated to that goal.”
Putin’s apparent willingness to procrastinate could reflect Russia’s confidence about the military progress of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, where it has stepped up offensive operations along large sections of the front line.
A Ukrainian military spokesman said “heavy battles” were raging around the strategic city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, and north of nearby Toretsk. A highway that serves as a crucial logistical hub was coming under regular drone attack, threatening Ukraine’s operations in the area, soldiers said.
DeepState, a Ukrainian analytical group close to the military, called the situation “unfavourable” for Kyiv’s forces and said Russian troops were “pushing through positions and approaching the administrative border of Donetsk region” — one of the areas Russia unilaterally annexed in 2022 yet does not fully control.
DeepState’s map, where it tracks changes on the front line, shows the Russians less than 5km from that border where the fighting is most intense.
Capturing the entire eastern Donetsk region — along with neighbouring Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, the other three areas it annexed in 2022 — remains a key military objective for Moscow. Its army has suffered heavy losses in pursuit of this goal. In talks with Ukrainian officials in Turkey last week, Russia made any ceasefire conditional on Kyiv withdrawing all its forces from all four regions.
Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said Russia was succeeding in inching along the front line and was managing to recruit soldiers in large numbers.
“Militarily, I think Russia can sustain the fight for the time being, given its sustained recruitment of volunteers,” he said. “Russia’s leadership likely believes they can still improve their position on the battlefield.”
As the summer approached, weather conditions would become more conducive to offensive operations, which could benefit Russia, Lee said.
“Russia still hasn’t achieved its minimum goal of occupying all of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions . . . so it may try to seize as much territory as possible this summer before engaging more seriously in negotiations.”
Additional reporting by James Politi in Washington
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