They talked about the fighting in Ukraine, of course. But the U.S. and Russian presidents also chatted about improving relations between Washington and Moscow, peace in the Middle East, global security and even hockey games.

During the more than two-hour chat — the longest such call between the countries’ leaders in years — Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin covered a range of topics. And importantly for Putin, the conversation gave him a chance to pivot away from the war in Ukraine and engage more broadly about global issues, drawing a line under Washington’s past efforts to cast him as an international pariah.

Tuesday’s phone call appeared to reflect both leaders’ interest in mending the U.S.-Russian ties that have plummeted to their lowest point since the Cold War amid the 3-year-old conflict in Ukraine. The Kremlin and the state-controlled Russian media praised it as a long-sought launch of an equal dialogue between the two nuclear superpowers.

A halt to fighting in Ukraine seems as distant as ever

While both the White House and the Kremlin cast the discussion as a key step toward peace in Ukraine, Putin’s uncompromising demands are making a truce elusive.

Seeking to cultivate warm ties with Washington, Putin accepted a halt on strikes on energy infrastructure while avoiding an outright rejection of Trump’s 30-day ceasefire. The Kremlin leader linked it to a halt in Western arms supplies and a freeze on Kyiv’s mobilization effort -– conditions that Ukraine and its allies firmly reject.

Unlike Kyiv, which accepted Trump’s ceasefire offer amid a series of battlefield setbacks, Putin appears to have little interest in a quick cessation of hostilities, with Russian forces firmly holding the initiative on the battlefield.

Ukraine is on the verge of completely losing its foothold in Russia’s Kursk region, where its forces are clinging to a sliver of land along the border after their surprise incursion in August 2024. Russia’s offensive shattered Kyiv’s hopes of exchanging its gains in Kursk for some of the territory Moscow captured elsewhere in Ukraine.

Putin said Ukrainian forces that remain in Kursk are surrounded — a claim echoed by Trump — even though Kyiv denied its soldiers are encircled.

Ukrainian officials fear that Russia could try to attack the nearby Sumy region that borders Kursk. At the same time, the Russian army is pressing offensives in several sectors of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.

By making the ceasefire conditional on a freeze of arms supplies to Ukraine and its mobilization effort, Putin is trying to cement Russian gains and force Kyiv to cave in to Moscow’s demands. He wants Ukraine to withdraw its forces from the four regions that Russia illegally annexed but never fully captured, renounce its bid to join NATO, and radically trim its military.

Putin’s acceptance of a halt on strikes on Ukraine’s energy facilities has allowed Trump to claim at least partial success for his peacemaking effort, but the move wasn’t a major concession by Moscow, given the massive damage to Ukraine’s power grid from years of attacks.

U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, who flew to Moscow last week to meet with Putin, praised both leaders and offered optimism the Kremlin was moving toward a broader truce.

“I would commend President Putin for all he did today on that call to move his country close to a final peace deal,” Witkoff told the Fox News Channel. “And I would give all the credit to President Trump. … I can’t overstate how compelling he was on this call.”

Trump called Zelenskyy for about an hour Wednesday and said in a social media post the conversation was to “align both Russia and Ukraine in terms of their requests and needs.”

The creation of U.S. and Russian working groups to ponder ceasefire specifics and a possible deal on ensuring safe shipping in the Black Sea that was mentioned in the Kremlin readout of the Trump-Putin call marked yet another move toward discussing the fate of Ukraine in its absence, upending the Biden administration’s policy “of nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”

“The conversation didn’t bring good news to either Kyiv or Europe, who saw themselves clearly ignored,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, a Moscow-based political analyst familiar with Kremlin thinking. “Two great powers are discussing the settlement while paying little attention to others.”

Stanovaya noted Putin has shifted discussion away from the ceasefire while giving little in return.

“This is very bad news for Ukraine, which is increasingly being treated as a bargaining chip in this game,” she said.

Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, deplored Trump’s “affinity or sympathy” toward Putin and his reluctance to significantly punish or constrain Russia, which allows the Kremlin leader to stick to his strategy to “grind down Ukraine militarily and outlast the West politically.”

“Russia wants to decide the fate of Ukraine and ultimately of Europe, with the United States alone, with no other negotiating partner,” he said.

“I can’t think of another period in my lifetime when diplomacy has been so upended in such a brief space of time,” he said, noting the closest example was in the 1980s when Mikhail Gorbachev was the leader of the Soviet Union.

While “it took Gorbachev four years to abandon longstanding Soviet commitments in Eastern Europe,” Gould-Davies said, “it has taken four weeks for the United States to call into question fundamental, longstanding commitments to Europe.”