President Donald Trump is set to speak Monday with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in what he said is an attempt to stop the “bloodbath” of the war in Ukraine.
Trump said the call would be taking place at 10 a.m. — although he did not specify whether this was on Eastern Daylight Time or in another time zone. He said he would also be speaking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as well as members of NATO.
“We realize there’s a bit of an impasse here, and I think the president’s going to say to President Putin, look, are you serious? Are you real about this?” Vice President JD Vance told journalists Monday in Rome, where he was received by Pope Leo XIV.
“The proposal from the United States has always been, look, there are a lot of economic benefits to thawing relations between Russia and the rest of the world, but you’re not going to get those benefits you keep on killing a lot of innocent people,” he added.
Meanwhile Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia “highly values” and is “grateful to the American side.” In a briefing with journalists, he said that if the U.S. can “help to achieve our goals through peaceful means, then this is indeed preferable.”
Peskov was also asked about the chance of Trump and Putin meeting in person, a possibility floated by the American president Friday.
“It will largely depend on what they themselves decide,” Peskov said. The meeting “needs to be worked out” by the two leaders in terms of dates and other details, he added.
Ahead of the much anticipated Trump-Putin call, leaders from Britain, France, Germany and Italy said they spoke Sunday with Trump. The British government said in a statement that it was urging “Putin to take peace talks seriously.”
Those leaders “also discussed the use of sanctions if Russia failed to engage seriously in a ceasefire and peace talks,” the statement said — something Trump has previously threatened.
“Tomorrow, President Putin must show he wants peace by accepting the 30-day unconditional ceasefire proposed by President Trump and backed by Ukraine and Europe,” French President Emmanuel Macron said on X.
Trump has been widely criticized for appearing to offer concessions to Russia while demanding sacrifices from Ukraine. Those voices were joined last week by former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink, who gave details of why she stepped down last month.
“The policy since the beginning of the Trump administration has been to put pressure on the victim, Ukraine, rather than on the aggressor, Russia,” she wrote in an opinion piece Friday for the Detroit Free Press.
“Peace at any price is not peace at all ― it is appeasement,” she said, adding that “we must show leadership in the face of aggression, not weakness or complicity.”
While the diplomatic activity carries on, the violence in Ukraine continues. Russia has continued its near-nightly drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian civilians, more than three years after it launched a full-scale invasion and tried to seize Kyiv.
On Sunday, Russia shelled residential neighborhoods of the eastern Ukrainian city of Kherson, killing a 75-year-old woman and injuring two other people, the city council posted on the Telegram messaging site.
As well as being widely blamed for launching an unprovoked war, Russia is condemned across the West for the highly repressive and authoritarian state fashioned by Putin’s Kremlin.
On Monday, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office labeled one of those critics, Amnesty International, as an “undesirable organization” and effectively banned it. The authority accused the London-based human rights watchdog of being “Russophobic,” trying to prolong the war, wanting to “justify the crimes of Ukrainian neo-Nazis” and its staffers of supporting “extremist organizations.”
Trump, who has often spoken warmly of Putin, rarely if ever mentions these human rights concerns.
Trump said in a Truth Social post Saturday that he would be speaking with Putin at 10 a.m. Monday with the purpose of “stopping the ‘bloodbath’ that is killing, on average, more than 5,000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers a week.” NBC News has not independently verified the numbers that Trump cited.
Apparently referring both to his planned call with Putin and his slated talks with Zelenskyy and other European leaders, Trump added that “hopefully it will be a productive day, a ceasefire will take place, and this very violent war, a war that should have never happened, will end.”
Despite promising on multiple occasions to end the war in 24 hours of taking office, Trump has since found the reality much different since beginning his second term.
U.S.-brokered negotiations saw Russia and Ukrainian delegations meet in person in Istanbul last week for the first time since the early days of the war.
However the demands of the two sides remain far apart: with Russia saying it will only sign a truce if Ukraine effectively surrenders. Ukraine says these demands are unacceptable.
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