Trump-Putin Call Set for Tuesday Over Ceasefire Talks

President Donald Trump confirmed that he is set to hold Ukraine war peace talks with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday this week, saying land and power plants are among the items on the agenda for how a post-war Ukraine will look.

Negotiations over the future of the Ukraine War have been continuing behind closed doors between the United States of America and the Russian Federation, President Trump said, as he revealed that leader talks are scheduled for Tuesday.

President Trump greeted journalists aboard Air Force One as he flew from Florida to Washington D.C. late Sunday night and opened with thoughts on the Ukraine War before taking questions. Summarising the advances in communications with Russia in recent days — which, until weeks ago, the two countries had been out of contact for years, following the Biden Presidency’s freeze in response to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine — President Trump remarked: “We learned a lot, we’re doing pretty well I think with Russia. We’ll see if we have something to announce maybe, by Tuesday.”

Confirming that a personal discussion with President Putin is going ahead this week, as earlier briefed, President Trump continued: “I’ll be speaking to President Putin on Tuesday, a lot of work has been done over the weekend. 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.”

President Trump also offered some specifics of what he anticipated in the discussion, saying there were ongoing talks on “dividing up certain assets”, with “a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides, Ukraine and Russia”.

He said: “I think we’ll be talking about land. There’s a lot of land, it’s a lot different than it was before the war as you know. We’ll be talking about land, we’ll be talking about power plants because that’s a big question.”

While President Trump didn’t specify which power plants he was referring to, it is all but certain the forthcoming discussions will be about the famous Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, one of the largest in the world, which has six reactors producing a nameplate capacity of 5.7 megawatts.

In reality, the plant’s reactors are largely in cold shutdown and have been for several years as the war rages around the plant. Russian forces have occupied Zaporizhzhia since March 2022, and it has been damaged several times over the course of the war, with both sides accusing each other of placing safety at risk with strikes.

President Trump and President Putin are last known to have spoken on February 12th, and further personal discussions between the Presidents have been cited as a likely future outcome over the whole course of U.S.-Russian talks since the first meeting in Saudi Arabia on February 18th. It seemed possible that such a call– a step towards a potential in-person negotiation between the two men– could have taken place last week amid fresh talks, but it soon became apparent that it would be this week at the earliest.

Speaking on Sunday about the coming call, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff talked up the prospects of a productive discussion, saying, ” The two presidents are going to have a really good and positive discussion this week.”

Nevertheless, news of Tuesday’s discussion comes amid a backdrop of accusations from Ukraine and European powers accusing Russia of slow-walking a ceasefire in a bid to sabotage talks altogether. Ukraine’s President Zelensky said last week that “manipulative” Putin sees it in his best interests to keep the war going and is consequently doing the minimum possible engagement with President Trump to keep talks going without finding a conclusion.

Russia saying it agrees with the idea of peace in principle but saying it has reservations and demands to be met first is “not good enough”, said Britain’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer on Saturday. He announced that military leaders from consenting countries would be meeting in London on Thursday this week for their own talks in order to establish “practical work to support a potential deal… strong and robust plans in place to swing in behind a peace deal and guarantee Ukraine’s future security.”

The scale of a mooted Western deployment to Ukraine has somewhat receded as the weeks have gone by, from a force of a million men theorised by President Zelensky as a security-guaranteeing peacekeeper force to just “a few thousand” now discussed by France’s President Emmanuel Macron. The idea of any European troops in Ukraine as peacekeepers at all has been called an unacceptable escalation by Russia, but so close to an actual peace negotiation, it is, of course, unclear what such comments really are hard lines and which are bargaining chips to be haggled away.