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.
In this photo distributed by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Monday, March 17, 2025, a Russian soldier prepares to raise a flag atop a house in Staraya Sorochina, a village in the Sudzha district of the Kursk region of Russia after it was taken over by Russian troops. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)
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.
Discussion between ‘two superpowers’
While seeking to expand his military gains in Ukraine to dictate peace terms, Putin also used the call to shift the discussion away from a ceasefire to other global issues. He appeared to win Trump’s interest.
The White House said in its readout of the call that the leaders “spoke broadly about the Middle East as a region of potential cooperation to prevent future conflicts,” discussed the need to stop proliferation of strategic weapons and “agreed that a future with an improved bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia has huge upside.”
“This includes enormous economic deals and geopolitical stability when peace has been achieved,” it said.
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.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov underlined that Putin and Trump “understand each other well, trust each other and intend to move gradually toward normalization of Russian-U.S. relations.”
Russian state TV and other Kremlin-controlled media hailed the call as a move toward broad cooperation between Moscow and Washington.
The pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda noted that “normalization of relations between two nuclear superpowers” was on the agenda, and state news agency RIA Novosti pointed at the “evolving partner relations between the U.S. and Russia.”
“This format is line with new vision of a multipolar world that is apparently shared by both the White House and the Kremlin,” it said.
Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Endowment said “the most significant outcome was the implicit acceptance of U.S.-Russian cooperation on key international and bilateral issues.”
She added that “this marks an obvious victory for Putin, who seeks to decouple bilateral relations from the Ukraine war.”
“The ongoing ‘detoxification’ of Russia continues,” Stanovaya said in a commentary, even noting an agreement on Putin’s proposal to organize hockey matches between Russian and American players.
Ukraine and Europe take a back seat
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy responded to the Putin-Trump call by warning that “trying to negotiate without Ukraine, in my view, will not be productive.”
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.”
