President Trump said that he’s “not happy” about a phone call he had with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday, in which they discussed Ukraine.
The president commented on their discussion during a press gaggle just before boarding Air Force One to get to an event at the Iowa State Fair celebrating the passage of his so-called “big, beautiful” spending bill in the House and Senate. “We had a call, it was a pretty long call,” Trump told reporters. “We talked about a lot of things including Iran. And we also talked about the war with Ukraine, and I’m not happy about that.” He then added: “I didn’t make any progress today with him at all.”
News of the call had been revealed earlier in the day in a report from the Associated Press. Putin’s foreign affairs advisor Yuri Ushakov told the outlet that Trump had pushed for an end to the fighting, and that the Russian leader had indicated that Moscow was ready to pursue talks Kiev, although Russia remained committed to its goals in Ukraine and the need to remove the “root causes” of the conflict. Ushakov added that “Russia will not back down from these goals.”
While those goals were not spelled out by Ushakov in his comments to reporters after the call, Russia has long sought for Ukraine to abandon any plans for a NATO bid and to cede territorial gains made by Russia in eastern Ukraine since the start of its invasion. Ushakov also said that Putin called for the conflict in the Middle East to be resolved “exclusively by political and diplomatic means.”
Trump has had six phone calls with Putin since taking office in January. The White House’s support for Kyiv took a nosedive since Trump returned to the Oval Office in January, a change from the previous administration that was made clear during a tense meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, where Trump said, “you’ve got to be more thankful because let me tell you, you don’t have the cards.” The United States has provided roughly $175 billion in mostly military aid since the start of Russia’s invasion in February 2023, with members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) providing large aid packages to the country as well.
On Wednesday, the White House announced a pause on weapons shipments to Ukraine, including air defense missiles, which a press official said was done in order to “put America’s interests first.” Trump said on Thursday that “we haven’t” stopped giving arms to Ukraine, even as the Pentagon confirmed the White House’s previous statement, calling its pause on the arms shipment a “capability review.”
