Reports are now coming in about a one-hour telephone conversation between Russia's President Putin and President Donald Trump. Reports have it that President Trump reportedly told the Russian president that the full restoration of relations between the U.S. and Russia - a reset, if you like - would depend on Russia making peace with Ukraine.
It's unclear what Russia's reaction to that will be.
U.S. President Donald Trump told Russian President Vladimir Putin that a swift resolution to the Ukraine war could pave the way for the countries to fully restore trade and economic ties, according to a Kremlin readout of a call between the two leaders.
Trump and Putin were said to have exchanged views on the results of the recent visits to Moscow and Kyiv by U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who have sought to revive stalled diplomatic talks to bring an end to the conflict.
This may well be a case of jaw-jaw being better than war-war, but President Putin seems pretty determined to do both; he's been doing that all along, starting with the ballyhooed Alaska Summit, which was notable mostly in that it didn't result in an end to the Russo-Ukrainian War. But President Trump is trying again, and with good reason; if he or his administration could somehow broker an end to this nasty conflict, the largest in Europe since 1945, then that's a big foreign-policy feather in his cap.
Russian state media put an optimistic tone on the meeting, but Russia has always taken a happy tone when it thinks things are going its way.
Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said Trump and Putin spoke to each other for exactly one hour on Tuesday, describing the conversation as “constructive and very candid,” according to Russia’s Tass news agency.
Trump made clear that he wanted the Ukraine war to come to an end “as soon as possible,” Ushakov said, adding that Putin gave Trump an “objective and thorough” analysis of what Russia characterizes as its special military operation.
As far as President Putin being completely forthcoming with that "objective and thorough" analysis of this operation, you can color me skeptical. No doubt President Trump is skeptical as well, given Putin's history around this matter.
Here's the problem: Neither side can keep this thing going forever. But every war, every time, has been won or lost by logistics, and while Ukraine has done some remarkable campaigning with what they have and what they have been given, the problem Ukraine faces now is the number of warm bodies they can put on the line.
On top of the 2 million Ukrainians wanted for evading mobilisation, the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office says some 290,000 cases have been opened since 2022 against soldiers for abandoning their posts.
That's not a good sign. Russia, of course, has many more young men to feed into the meat grinder, although they do have their problems with draft evasion as well.
Meanwhile, Kyiv is once more under air attack by Russia, only hours after the end of the temporary cease-fire for the visit of the American envoys. It's still slash-and-snap time in Eastern Europe.
President Trump has made ending this conflict a key foreign-policy goal. Right now, it doesn't look like that conflict is any closer to an end, no matter how much saddle-soaping Vladimir Putin does in a phone call.
You can view that full Kremlin readout of the call here.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are once again respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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