Russia says Putin to talk to Trump as US urges Ukraine truce

Greg Sullivan, Bloomberg News on Mar 17, 2025

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The Kremlin confirmed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to speak to President Donald Trump on Tuesday amid the U.S. push for a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine.

“Such a conversation is being prepared for Tuesday,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday, according to the Interfax news service. He declined to comment further on the planned discussions.

Trump had first announced the call to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday, saying there was “a very good chance” for a deal. “We are doing pretty well I think with Russia,” he said. “We’ll see if we have something to announce maybe by Tuesday.”

The U.S. is pressing for Russia to agree to a 30-day ceasefire that Ukraine has said it’s ready to accept. While Putin has said Russia is willing to consider a truce in principle, he has insisted on a number of conditions before he’ll commit to any halt to the invasion he started three years ago.

The date of the planned call is loaded with symbolism for Putin, who has declared March 18 as the annual day of Russia’s “reunification” with Crimea to mark the 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula. At a concert on Red Square last year marking the 10th anniversary of the seizure, Putin told Russians “the same is true” for areas of eastern Ukraine that Russia has occupied since he ordered the 2022 full-scale invasion.

The Russian leader is also due to speak to Trump a year after he celebrated getting 87% of the vote for a fifth term in a March 17 election that was tightly controlled by the Kremlin.

This would be the second phone call between Trump and Putin. The first, on Feb. 12, was followed days later by a meeting between top U.S. and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia at which they agreed to revive diplomatic ties. Russian and U.S. officials held further talks in Istanbul last month.

U.S. envoy Steven Witkoff met with Putin in Moscow last week, though he didn’t disclose what they discussed. It was the second time they had held talks.

Ukraine accepted U.S. proposals for a 30-day truce at talks between the two sides in the Saudi city of Jeddah last week.

The flurry of engagement between Washington and Moscow has made European leaders worried that Trump may concede too much on Ukraine’s behalf in a direct exchange with Putin.

Putin has deflected efforts to stop the fighting as his forces make incremental battlefield gains, including pushing Ukrainian forces back from most of the parts of Russia’s Kursk region that they’d seized in an surprise offensive last year.

Trump said much of the planned call on Tuesday will be about territory.

“A lot of land is a lot different than it was before the war, as you know,” he told reporters. “We’ll be talking about land, we’ll be talking about power plants — that’s, you know, that’s a big question.”

“We’re already talking about that, dividing up certain assets,” he added.

Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen said concessions need to be made by Russia, because “otherwise you will be compromising international law and the U.N. Charter, which would have global implications.”

“To be loud and clear, I think the genuine effort by President Trump to really achieve peace here should not be misused by Putin to further weaken Ukraine,” she told reporters on Monday.

Putin has said he wants a long-term settlement, while insisting on conditions that would be difficult for Kyiv to accept. The Kremlin has previously demanded that Ukraine become a neutral nation, significantly reduce the size of its armed forces and cede territory that Russia has already seized in the war, while abandoning ambitions to join the NATO military alliance.

The European Union’s top foreign policy official, Kaja Kallas, said the conditions that Moscow has presented show that “they don’t really want peace.”

“They are presenting as conditions all their ultimate goals that they want to achieve from the war,” she told reporters before a meeting of E.U. foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday. “We really need to see that the ball is in Russia’s court.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine has stressed the need for security guarantees strong enough to deter Russia from renewing hostilities in the future.

European officials thrashed out plans for a peacekeeping force of more than 10,000 troops for Ukraine, the Sunday Times reported, citing senior government sources. The bulk would likely come from the U.K. and France, according to the newspaper, which also said that about 35 countries have agreed to supply weapons, and logistical and intelligence support to the mission.

European leaders want to see any force on the ground in Ukraine backed up by U.S. security guarantees in the form of air power, intelligence and border surveillance. It’s far from clear whether Trump would be willing to do that.