The US leader says he will phone the Russian president, followed by his Ukrainian counterpart and NATO allies on Monday.
United States President Donald Trump says he will phone his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, followed by Ukraine’s leader and NATO allies on Monday in a push to bring the Ukraine war to an end.
“HOPEFULLY IT WILL BE A PRODUCTIVE DAY, A CEASEFIRE WILL TAKE PLACE, AND THIS VERY VIOLENT WAR, A WAR THAT SHOULD HAVE NEVER HAPPENED, WILL END,” Trump wrote on his social networking site, Truth Social, on Saturday.
Trump’s remarks come a day after the first Moscow-Kyiv talks in three years failed to yield a ceasefire agreement. Putin had declined an invitation from Zelenskyy to attend Friday’s talks, sending a lower-level delegation in his place, a move that led Zelenskyy to say the Russian leader was not taking peace efforts “seriously”.
Following the talks, which led to an agreement to exchange 1,000 prisoners each, Ukraine’s Defence Minister Rustem Umerov said the “next step” would be a meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin.
On Saturday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia considered the move possible, “but only as a result of the work and upon achieving certain results in the form of an agreement between the two sides”.
He did not elaborate on what would be required.
Peskov said both sides needed to complete the prisoner swap before fixing the next round of talks. Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, indicated the exchange could take place as early as next week.
‘Barbaric war crime’
Earlier on Saturday, a Russian drone attack in Ukraine’s Sumy region killed nine bus passengers in what the National Police described as “a cynical war crime”.
Seven others were injured in the attack in Sumy’s Bilopillia, Zelenskyy said in a post on X, and called for tougher sanctions on Moscow.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence said it had targeted Ukrainian military equipment, the TASS state news agency reported.
“All the deceased were civilians,” Zelenskyy said, adding that preliminary reports indicated a father, mother and daughter had been killed. “And the Russians could not have failed to understand what kind of vehicle they were targeting. This was a deliberate killing of civilians.”
He said the wounded had suffered burns, fractures, and blast injuries, and were receiving treatment in hospital.
The Ukrainian leader said he expected tougher sanctions from Ukraine’s partners to pressure Moscow “to stop the killings”.
“Without tougher sanctions, without stronger pressure, Russia will not seek real diplomacy,” he said. “This must change.”
He said Russia had sent “a weak and unprepared” delegation to the Istanbul talks on Friday without a meaningful mandate, and real steps were needed to end the war.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha denounced the attack as a “deliberate and barbaric war crime”, accusing Putin of continuing “to wage a war against civilians” and calling for additional pressure on Russia.
“There should be no illusions. Pressure on Moscow must be increased to put an end to Russian terror,” Sybiha wrote.
Russia denies targeting civilians since launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
