KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy discussed the path to a ceasefire between Kyiv and Moscow on Wednesday, a day after the U.S. leader held similar talks with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
Trump's call with Zelenskyy was about half the length of his call Tuesday, during which Putin agreed not to target Ukraine's energy infrastructure but refused to back a full 30-day ceasefire.
In a social media post, Trump said his call with Zelenskyy was to “align both Russia and Ukraine in terms of their requests and needs” as he seeks to bring a halt to fighting.
“We are very much on track,” Trump added, saying Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz would provide further details of the conversation.
Prior to his call with Trump, Zelenskyy said Putin’s limited ceasefire pledge was “very much at odds with reality” following an overnight barrage of drone strikes across the country.
“Even last night, after Putin’s conversation with ... Trump, when Putin said that he was allegedly giving orders to stop strikes on Ukrainian energy, there were 150 drones launched overnight, including on energy facilities,” Zelenskyy said at a news conference in Helsinki with Finnish President Alexander Stubb.
The Kremlin says Kyiv isn't upholding its end of the bargain
Russia responded by saying it had halted its targeting of Ukraine's energy facilities and accused Kyiv of attacking equipment near one of its pipelines.
“Unfortunately, we see that for now there is no reciprocity on the part of the Kyiv regime," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
The White House described the call between Trump and Putin as the first step in a “movement to peace” that Washington hopes will include a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea and eventually a full and lasting end to the fighting.
But there was no indication that Putin backed away from his conditions for a prospective peace deal, which are fiercely opposed by Kyiv.
Russia is holding the ceasefire proposal ‘hostage’
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said that Putin’s demands during the call with Trump would amount to “Ukrainian capitulation.”
“Putin is attempting to hold the temporary ceasefire proposal hostage in order to extract preemptive concessions ahead of formal negotiations to end the war,” the ISW said in an analysis of readouts from the calls.
Stubb called the discussions between Putin and Trump a step in the right direction, but Finland's president said that Russia needs to end its aggression.
“There are only two ways to respond to the proposal of the president of the United States: it’s a yes or a no — no buts, no conditions,” Stubb said. “Ukraine accepted a ceasefire without any forms of conditions. If Russia refuses to agree, we need to increase our efforts to strengthen Ukraine and ratchet up pressure on Russia to convince them to come to the negotiating table.”
White House national security adviser Mike Waltz said on social media that he and his Russian counterpart, Yuri Ushakov, agreed Wednesday that their teams would meet soon in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, "to focus on implementing and expanding the partial ceasefire President Trump secured from Russia.”
It was not immediately clear who would be part of the delegations or if Ukrainian officials were also invited to take part in the Saudi Arabia talks.
Ukraine and Russia trade accusations
Shortly after the lengthy phone call between Trump and Putin on Tuesday, air raid sirens sounded in Kyiv, followed by explosions as residents took shelter.
Despite efforts to repel the attack, several strikes hit civilian infrastructure, including two hospitals, a railway and more than 20 houses, Zelenskyy said. Russian drones were reported over Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Sumy, Chernihiv, Poltava, Kharkiv, Kirovohrad, Dnipropetrovsk, and Cherkasy regions.
The Russian Defense Ministry said its military had launched seven drones at power facilities related to the military-industrial complex in Ukraine’s southern Mykolaiv region, but that it shot them down after receiving Putin’s order to not hit energy infrastructure.
Moscow accused Ukraine of targeting its energy facility in the Krasnodar region bordering the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014, several hours after the Putin and Trump talks. The ministry said that three drones targeted oil transfer equipment that feeds the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, causing a fire and leading one oil tank to lose pressure.
“It is absolutely clear that we are talking about yet another provocation deliberately concocted by the Kyiv regime, aimed at derailing the peace initiatives of the U.S. president,” the ministry said.
Russia said that its air defenses intercepted 57 Ukrainian drones over the Azov Sea and several Russian regions — the border provinces of Kursk and Bryansk and the nearby regions of Oryol and Tula.
Zelenskyy said that “words of a ceasefire” weren't enough.
“If the Russians don’t hit our facilities, we definitely won’t hit theirs,” Zelenskyy said.
Meanwhile, the two combatants said Wednesday that they had each swapped 175 prisoners in one of the largest exchanges of the war.
Ukraine's red line
Zelenskyy rejected Putin’s key condition that Western allies stop providing military aid and intelligence to Ukraine. He said that doing so would endanger lives if citizens were blind to incoming air raids, and lead to the continuation of the war.
“I don’t think anybody should make any concessions in terms of helping Ukraine, but rather, assistance to Ukraine should be increased," Zelenskyy said. "This will be a signal that Ukraine is ready for any surprises from the Russians.”
Nigel Gould-Davies, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said that it was “completely unsurprising” that Putin rejected the ceasefire, adding that it’s “imprudent for him to tell President Trump that directly, since Trump has made ending the war a very, very high priority.”
“What we have now, in effect, is a competition or rivalry between Kyiv and Moscow to persuade Trump that it’s the other side that is responsible for preventing Trump from achieving his goal of ending the war,” Gould-Davies said.
Zelenskyy said that one of the most difficult issues in future negotiations would be the issue of territorial concessions.
“For us, the red line is the recognition of the Ukrainian temporarily occupied territories as Russian," he said. “We will not go for it.”
___ Yehor Konovalov in Kyiv, Dasha Litvinova in Tallinn, Estonia, Geir Moulson in Berlin, Aamer Madhani and Zeke Miller in Washington, and Brian Melley in London contributed to this report.
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