Trump said during a Fox News interview that aired Tuesday night that aid was not discussed during the call.
“We didn’t talk about aid, actually. We didn’t talk about aid at all. We talked about a lot of things, but aid was never discussed,” Trump said.
When asked by host Laura Ingraham whether Putin had asked for a termination of aid to Ukraine as part of the deal, Trump said: “No, he didn’t.”
Zelenskyy said in a news conference Tuesday that his country would support a proposal aimed at ending the war and establishing lasting peace.
“We will support any proposals that lead to a sustainable, just peace. But for this we must understand what is at stake,” he said, adding that efforts to “negotiate without Ukraine, in my view, will not be productive.”
Zelenskyy also urged Trump to initiate a conversation with him by phone to identify next steps.
“We will give support, but in order to support something we need to understand what specifically it is. If President Trump can find time — he is a busy man — if he has time he can phone at any time, we are ready to pick up. We are ready to discuss the next steps with him,” he said.
Zelenskyy has warned that he doesn’t trust Putin to stick to a ceasefire because Russia hasn’t abided by previous agreements with Ukraine.
The White House also signaled that the Trump administration wants to improve relations between the U.S. and Russia, saying in its statement: “The two leaders agreed that a future with an improved bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia has huge upside. This includes enormous economic deals and geopolitical stability when peace has been achieved.”
The call between Trump and Putin began around 10 a.m. ET and lasted at least an hour and a half.
A Kremlin aide later wrote in a post on X that it was “a PERFECT call.” He may have been referring to the infamous phone conversation Trump held with Zelenskyy in 2019 in which Trump asked the Ukrainian president to investigate Hunter Biden and suggested that the U.S. would withhold aid if Zelenskyy didn’t cooperate. Trump later said it was a “perfect call,” though the House, then controlled by Democrats, impeached the president for the first time later that year.
Trump said late Monday that he looked forward to the call with Putin in a post on Truth Social, adding that “many elements of a Final Agreement have been agreed to, but much remains.”
While the White House readout didn’t include specific details of what a permanent ceasefire would entail, the call most likely involved a discussion of what Ukraine will have to give up to achieve a pause after three years of fighting since Putin ordered his troops to invade Russia’s neighbor.
Trump, who has been trying to win Putin’s support for a 30-day ceasefire proposal that Ukraine accepted last week, said late Sunday that discussions with Putin would involve “dividing up certain assets” that included land and power plants.
The president has intimated that the Zaporizhzhia power plant, Europe’s biggest nuclear facility, as well as land — Ukraine controls part of the Russian region of Kursk, while Russia holds several regions of Ukraine — will be up for discussion.
He told reporters in Washington on Monday that Ukrainian soldiers in the Kursk region were “in deep trouble,” according to Reuters, adding that his administration’s temporary suspension of military and intelligence assistance to Kyiv was an attempt to “get Ukraine to do the right thing.”
Putin has repeatedly indicated that Russia wants to cement his country’s land grabs during the war and stop Kyiv from ever joining NATO. Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, told ABC News on Sunday that the prospect of a pathway into NATO for Ukraine was “incredibly unlikely.”
Zelenskyy has previously stated that he would be willing to resign in exchange for peace or NATO membership, which he sees as imperative for Ukrainian security.
U.S. Special Envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff, who met with Putin in Moscow last week, on Sunday suggested that the ceasefire discussions would likely involve territorial concessions from Kyiv over Kursk — the western Russian region where Ukraine has a foothold and where Kremlin troops have recently moved closer to ejecting Kyiv’s forces.
Referring to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine, Witkoff said the “nuclear reactor that supplies quite a bit of electricity to the country of Ukraine” has “got to be dealt with.”
He added that implementing a ceasefire would involve access to ports and a potential agreement over the Black Sea.
The apparent territorial ambitions of Putin have upended the security landscape in Eastern Europe, with Ukraine’s neighbors upping their defense budgets and beginning to remilitarize in recent years.
In that vein, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania said Tuesday that they were withdrawing from the Ottawa Treaty, an international agreement banning antipersonnel mines.
“The U.S. is negotiating with Russia about other people’s territory, which is precisely the nightmare scenario that not just Ukraine, but other countries in the east of Europe had feared,” Keir Giles, a fellow with the London-based think tank Chatham House, told NBC News before the call.
Giles added that the impact was limited not just to Europe, but also to other U.S. allies “watching this process with horror because they know … that they could be next.”
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