The Kremlin said on Monday that work is ongoing to prepare a second call between President Bradymir V. Putin and President Trump as American officials continued to project some optimism about a ceasefire contract with Ukraine, but refused to reveal the agenda agenda agenda.
The highly anticipated call scheduled for Tuesday will be the first known conversation between the two leaders as they agreed to support a month-backed ceasefire in a US-backed month, as long as Russia is doing the same thing. While Trump clearly states his desire to mediate some sort of ceasefire as quickly as possible, Putin appears to be trying to misuse the moment he wins more concessions.
On board the Air Force on Sunday evening, Trump said he hopes to discuss Putin with the territorial issues and the fate of the Ukrainian power plant. He also said there was already debate about “splitting certain assets.”
“We want to see if we can end that war,” Trump said. “We can probably do it. We probably can’t, but I think we have a very good opportunity.”
A Kremlin spokesman confirmed that calls are expected to be made the following day on Monday. When asked whether Ukraine’s nuclear power plants would be discussed, spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov said, “We will never move forward,” from Moscow’s “the content of the conversation between the two leaders cannot be discussed a priori.”
“That’s why we don’t do that,” he told the briefing.
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Putin has yet to agree to the 30-day ceasefire proposed by US officials after consultations with Ukrainian officials in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He says the idea is “right and we definitely support it,” but he sets out many conditions that could delay or derail the truce.
“There are questions that need to be discussed. I think we need to talk to our American colleagues and partners,” he said at a press conference Thursday.
These comments came just before Putin met Steve Witkov, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East. However, he has been involved in peace negotiations regarding other debates about restoring relations between Ukraine, Moscow and Washington.
Witkov told CNN on Sunday that meetings with the Russian leader lasted for three to four hours. He refused to share details of their conversation, but it worked, and both sides said “smacked the differences between them.”
Ukrainian President Volodim Zelensky accused Putin of stalling, and Russian army has stepped up discussions with the Trump administration about making progress on the battlefield and suspending hostilities.
With the recent push to drive out Ukrainian troops from most of the Russian Kursk region in Moscow, Kiev has taken away a key negotiation tip in potential negotiations. .
Progress in Kursk allows Russia to demonstrate to Trump that he has held the momentum of the battlefield. A battlefield map, compiled by both Russian and Western groups analyzing combat footage and satellite images, shows that Russian troops have already crossed from Kursk to the Smie region of Ukraine.
Zelensky accused Russia of preparing to launch a major attack on the Smee region, home to hundreds of thousands of people. These actions showed Putin was not interested in peace, he said.
Zelensky said on Sunday night that “Russia has stole almost another week — a week of war that Russia alone wants.”
“We do everything to further strengthen our diplomacy. We do everything to make diplomacy effective,” he wrote on social media.
Trump’s reference to “power plants” was the latest indication that such diplomacy about a ceasefire could be considered. The president did not elaborate, but his comments came on the same day Witkoff mentioned “nuclear reactors” in an interview with CBS News.
It seemed to be a reference to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine, which Russia seized early in the war and still ruled.
Europe’s largest six-leachacter factory has not powered Ukrainian grids since its capture. Proximity to frontline combat has long raised concerns about the risk of radiation disasters.
Ukraine has repeatedly requested that Russian forces leave the power plant to reduce the risk of nuclear accidents and mitigate the country’s power generation. However, the possibilities are growing more and more as Russia strengthens its retention of Ukraine’s occupied territory.
Victoria Halib, head of the Ukrainian Parliament’s subcommittee on energy security, said in a statement by Trump and Witkov that he was “a little surprised that the plant problems have emerged.”
“Ukraine wants to get it back,” she said, but it’s not clear why Russia would give up. The power plant is located in the southern region of Zaporidia in Ukraine, where Russia officially annexed, despite Russia’s control of only a portion of its territory.
It is unclear what Russia could seek in exchange for returning the Zaporidian plants to Ukraine’s rule.
Victoria Vojtsicka, a former MP and senior member of the Ukrainian Parliament’s Energy Committee, said Moscow has long been trying to resume exports of oil and gas to the West. These exports, the key source of revenue for the Russian government, stopped after the war began as European countries separated from Russia’s energy supply and imposed sanctions on Russian energy companies.
Tyler Pager contributed the report.
