President Donald Trump agreed in a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin to start negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine, sweeping aside three years of U.S. policy and blindsiding European allies who feared the more conciliatory American stance amounted to a giveaway to the Russian leader.
Trump revealed the conversation — his first publicly announced contact with Putin since retaking the U.S. presidency — on social media, saying the two had a “lengthy and highly productive phone call.” He said their teams would start negotiations immediately, and later told reporters in the Oval Office that he’ll probably meet Putin in Saudi Arabia in the “not-too-distant future.”
The phone call capped a flurry of activity that underscored Trump’s intent to follow through quickly with his campaign pledges and ditch former President Joe Biden’s approach, which explicitly avoided direct U.S.-Russia contact in favor of letting Ukraine take the lead.
Hours earlier, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told NATO allies the U.S. wouldn’t contribute troops to secure a peace, called eventual NATO membership for Ukraine unrealistic and said Ukraine would probably have to accept the loss of some territory.
European officials got no advance warning of Trump’s call with Putin, according to one official. Others called it a sell-out, worrying that the U.S. was giving in to Putin’s key demands without getting anything in return.
Ukraine and Europe must be part of negotiations and Kyiv should be provided with strong security guarantees, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, the U.K., Spain and the European Union said in a statement. A just and lasting peace is a necessary condition for strong transatlantic security, they added.
“In any negotiation, Europe must have a central role,” the E.U.’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said.
Trump’s move even stirred ire from some Republicans, including Nebraska Representative Don Bacon, who warned in a social media post of “consequences of rewarding the invader.”
Speaking later Wednesday to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said he planned to send more aid to Ukraine. Of the possibility, raised by Hegseth, that Russia would be likely to hang on to some Ukrainian territory, he said “I think some of it will come back.” He also swatted away concerns that he was weakening Ukraine’s negotiating position.
“I’m just here to try and get peace,” he said. “I don’t care so much about anything other than I want to stop having millions of people killed.”
The symbolism couldn’t have been more clear. In the years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S. under Biden had refused to discuss the war with Putin. “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” became a U.S. and European mantra — one that Trump has now set aside.
Trump spoke with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after Putin, and Zelenskyy later posted to social media that “we are charting our next steps to stop Russian aggression.” But Trump also took a jab at Zelenskyy, telling reporters his “poll numbers aren’t particularly great” and he’s going to need to hold elections soon. Ukraine’s elections have been suspended during the ear.
On Tuesday night, the U.S. announced that Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, had flown to Russia and secured the release of American teacher Marc Fogel. On Wednesday, it was revealed he was freed in exchange for Alexander Vinnik, a Russian national who had pleaded guilty to a money laundering conspiracy.
And U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent visited Kyiv as part of an effort toward an economic-security cooperation deal that would give the U.S. access to Ukrainian minerals. Such a deal might help pay for the continued assistance Trump said he would provide Ukraine.
The flurry of moves left European leaders and other U.S. partners reeling. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said Hegseth’s vision “sounds like abandoning Ukraine.” Others made clear that it was Putin — not the U.S., Europe or Ukraine — that had been the impediment to past peace talks.
“President after president knew that transatlantic security benefited both the U.S. and Europe,” former U.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said in an interview. “It seems Trump thinks he knows better. History shall be the judge of this decision.”
Trump had promised over the course of his presidential campaign that he’d seek a speedy end to the war. And while many of his positions reflect a widely shared understanding, allies had resisted saying so out loud in the past for fear of undercutting Ukraine once talks start.
“If the U.S. is promising Russia that Ukraine can never join NATO, if the U.S. won’t allow Ukraine to join NATO, Putin will have obtained one of his major objectives of this war,” said Kristine Berzina, managing director of the German Marshall Fund’s Geostrategy North. “This would be giving Putin what he wants on territorial concessions and NATO.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin invited Trump to visit Moscow and that their conversation lasted almost one and a half hours, including discussion of the Middle East. Zelenskyy’s office later confirmed that he talked with Trump for about an hour.
In the meantime, Ukraine is scrambling to find novel ways to buy weapons and keep up the fight against Russia. Ukrainian officials asked Trump’s administration to let them use frozen Russian assets worth $300 billion to buy U.S.-made weapons, according to European officials familiar with the matter.
Ukraine has raised the the idea of seizing the assets and using them to purchase American arms in multiple meetings between Ukraine, some of its allies and Trump’s team in recent weeks, the people said.
During his presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly claimed the war in Ukraine “would have never started” if he were in office and that he could end it even before returning to the White House. He vowed to curtail funding for Ukraine’s military effort. The U.S. was Ukraine’s largest financial backer under Biden.
Some experts and analysts said the Trump-Putin phone call and the U.S. policy shift were a positive sign and a recognition of the inevitable.
“It’s quite clear that the United States is not going to war with Russia to defend Ukraine, and that has been true for 35 years or longer,” said Thomas Graham, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. With negotiations sure to take months if not longer, he said “it will be critical that there be a Russia-U.S. channel.”
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