Donald Trump is to speak to Vladimir Putin on Tuesday – with the two expected to discuss territory and control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant – after the Russian president last week pushed back on a US-brokered plan for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine with a series of sweeping conditions he said would need to be met.
The US president said on Monday that many elements of a final deal on Ukraine had been agreed but much remained, ahead of the call with his Russian counterpart. “I look very much forward to the call with President Putin,” he wrote on Truth Social.
The Kremlin confirmed on Monday that the two leaders were due to speak by phone, after Trump’s statement that he planned to discuss with Putin ending the war in Ukraine. The US president also said that negotiators had already talked about “dividing up certain assets”, including power stations.
“I’ll be speaking to President Putin on Tuesday. A lot of work’s been done over the weekend,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One during a flight back to the Washington area from Florida.
“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end. Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance,” Trump said.
US and Russian officials have engaged in discussions about Ukraine in recent weeks, with talks accelerating after Washington and Kyiv agreed on a proposal for an immediate 30-day ceasefire last week.
Nevertheless, Putin in effect rejected the plan, instead outlining a series of conditions, including a halt to Ukraine’s rearmament and mobilisation, as well as a suspension of western military aid to Kyiv during the 30-day ceasefire. He also renewed calls for broader negotiations on a long-term settlement to the war.
Ukraine, which has agreed to the truce, accused Putin of seeking to prolong the war. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, has also consistently said the sovereignty of his country is not negotiable and that Russia must surrender the territory it has seized.
Trump said: “We will be talking about land. We will be talking about power plants.”
The US president did not elaborate, but he was most likely referring to the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine, the largest in Europe. He said: “I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides, Ukraine and Russia. We are already talking about that, dividing up certain assets.”
The White House gave no further details during a press briefing on Monday, but White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “there’s a power plant that is on the border of Russia and Ukraine that was up for discussion with the Ukrainians, and he (Trump) will address it in his call with Putin tomorrow.” Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant is not on the Russia-Ukraine border, but in Ukrainian territory which was seized by Russia early in the war.
Trump’s comments came hours after his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, said that the Russian president “accepts the philosophy” of Trump’s ceasefire and peace terms.
Witkoff told CNN that discussions with Putin over several hours last week had been “positive” and “solution-based”.
But he declined to confirm when asked whether Putin’s demands included the surrender of Ukrainian forces in Kursk, international recognition of Ukrainian territory seized by Russia as Russian, limits on Ukraine’s ability to mobilise, a halt to western military aid, and a ban on foreign peacekeepers.
The UK on Monday said a so-called “coalition of the willing” had now expanded beyond 30 countries willing to help with guarantees for a post-ceasefire Ukraine, with a “significant” number of those countries prepared to provide troops.
A Downing Street spokesperson said: “Obviously the contribution capabilities will vary, but this will be a significant force, with a significant number of countries providing troops and a larger group contributing in other ways.”
David Lammy later told parliament that the gathering of G7 foreign ministers in Canada last week had pledged to keep up the pressure on Russia to agree to the ceasefire.
The UK foreign secretary told MPs: “Now it is Putin who stands in the spotlight; Putin who must answer; Putin, who must choose. Are you serious, Mr Putin, about peace? Will you stop the fighting, or will you drag your feet and play games, play lip service to a ceasefire while still pummelling Ukraine?”
If so, Lammy said, the UK and other nations would respond. He said: “We are not waiting for the Kremlin if they reject a ceasefire. We have more cards that we can play.”
Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, on Monday criticised Putin’s negotiation tactics ahead of a meeting of the bloc’s foreign ministers. “What Russia has put forward makes it clear they don’t truly want peace. They are setting their ultimate war objectives as preconditions.”
Kallas is to visit London on Tuesday for talks, Lammy said, adding: “In this moment, Ukraine’s friends should be working hand in glove, and that requires a new era in UK-EU security cooperation.”
Emmanuel Macron, the French president, on Sunday said Russia’s permission was not needed for peacekeepers to deploy to Ukraine, noting that Ukraine was a sovereign state. “If Ukraine requests allied forces to be on its territory, it is not up to Russia to accept or reject them,” he said in remarks quoted by several French newspapers.
Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Alexander Grushko, also on Sunday said that any long-lasting peace treaty on Ukraine must meet Moscow’s demands and foreign troops deployed to Ukraine as peacekeepers would be considered by Russia to be combatants.
Regarding the possibility of European troops in Ukraine, he said: “It does not matter under what label Nato contingents were to be deployed on Ukrainian territory: be it the European Union, Nato, or in a national capacity … If they appear there, it means that they are deployed in the conflict zone with all the consequences for these contingents as parties to the conflict.
Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice has notified European officials that the US is withdrawing from a multinational taskforce established to investigate leaders behind the invasion of Ukraine, including Putin.
The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, which the US joined under Joe Biden in 2023, signals the latest shift in the unprecedented warming relations between Moscow and Washington. The US previously voted against a UN resolution drafted by Ukraine and the European Union condemning Russia on the third anniversary of its full-scale invasion.
On Monday, Russia also welcomed Trump’s decision to cut funding for Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, two US-funded news organisations that broadcast to audiences in authoritarian states. The Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, described the media outlets as “propagandistic, purely propagandistic”.
In February last year, Russia designated Radio Free Europe as an “undesirable organisation”, a move that effectively bans an organisation outright and creates problems for anyone who interacts with it
