London – President Donald Trump said he spoke to Russian President Putin on Wednesday, describing their call as “good” but “not a conversation that will lead to immediate peace”.
In an article on Truth Social, Trump said that the leaders had discussed the large -scale drone operation of Ukraine which targeted Russian military aerodromes on Sunday and “various other attacks” during their call of around 65 minutes.
“President Putin said, and very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on aerodromes,” said Trump.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on May 28, 2025 and President Donald Trump in Washington on April 20, 2025.
AP / AFP via Getty Images
With Ukrainian-Russian peace talks in the United States on Monday despite another series of negotiations in Istanbul, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his senior officials exert more pressure on Trump to increase the cost of what they consider Russian obscure.
Trump returned to functions in January after promising to end the war in 24 hours. But months of failed talks – with kyiv and Moscow are clearly far from their peace requests – left the president and his publicly frustrated administration.
Trump threatened both – Ukraine with the withdrawal of all help and Russia with more sanctions – with a punishment if his peace efforts fail. Ukraine and Russia both sought to supervise the other as the main obstacle to a peace agreement.
Ukraine has aligned itself with the fact that Trump could call on for a full 30-day ceasefire, a proposal that Putin refused. In the weeks that followed, Zelenskyy pushed Trump to meet Russia’s obstinacy with sanctions.
The firefighters work on the site of the Russian drone strike in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on June 4, 2025.
Vitaliii Hnidyi / Reuters
After the talks on Monday – which lasted just over an hour – Kyiv launched a renewed push.
“I would like to thank all the Americans, all Europeans who support this approach to put pressure on Russia in peace – it’s extremely important,” wrote Zelenskyy on Telegram on Tuesday evening, after the last series of deadly Russian drone attacks and missiles on his country – and after two attacks by the Ukraine Security Service (SBU) The Kerch Poverty Bridge.
“Putin does not change his behavior when he is not afraid of the consequences of his actions,” added Zelenskyy. “Russia must feel what war really means. Russia must bear the losses of war. They really have to think that the continuation of the war will have devastating consequences for them.”
The two parties agreed to continue the exchanges of prisoners during the last talks in Istanbul. But the Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha and Andriy Yermak – the influential chief of the presidential office of Zelenskyy – pushed the idea that negotiations have advanced the needle to a sustainable ceasefire agreement.
Yermak said in an article on social networks he had spoken with Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, talks, saying: “Russia’s position remains non -constructive”.
“I stressed that Russia blocks and manipulates the negotiation process to try to avoid American sanctions and has no real intention to stop hostilities,” said Yermak. “Only strong sanctions can force Russia to initiate serious negotiations.
Sybiha said that Russia “did not respond to our document describing Ukraine’s vision to end the war”, in an article on X summarizing the official conclusions of Ukraine in the second round of discussions.
“Instead of responding to our constructive proposals in Istanbul, the Russian part has passed a set of former ultimatums who do not bring the situation of true peace closer,” he said.
“This contradicts the previous promises of Russia, including in the United States, that it will highlight something realistic and doable this week in Istanbul,” added Sybiha, also calling for new American sanctions in Moscow.
Ukrainian soldiers are preparing to dismiss a system for launching Multiple Roquettes BM-21 to Russian troops in the Donetsk, Ukraine region on June 3, 2025.
Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy / Reuters
Trump also faces pressure at home. The republican senator Lindsey Graham – a long influence on the president’s foreign policy advisor – is one of those who push a bill on sanctions through the Senate that would slap the 500% prices on any country that buys Moscow energy products.
Sunday, after a visit to kyiv with the Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal, Graham wrote on X: “Russia kills men, women and children without discrimination. It is time for the world to act decisively against the aggression of Russia by holding China and other officials of the purchase of cheap Russian oil who supports the Putin war machine.”
The Kremlin has urged patience. “It would be wrong to expect immediate decisions or breakthroughs here,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists from the latest discussions on Tuesday. “But the work is underway. Some agreements have been concluded in Istanbul, and they are important. Indeed, above all, these are people. These agreements will be implemented.”
But Dmitry Medvedev – former Russian president and Prime Minister who has now been vice -president of the country’s Security Council – has given a darker reading on negotiations. The talks, he wrote on Telegram, “are not intended to reach a peace compromise based on certain imaginary and unrealistic conditions invented by others, but rather to guarantee our rapid victory and the complete destruction” of the government of Zelenskyy.
Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Wednesday that Tuesday’s explosion at the Kerch Strait Bridge caused no damage, after the Ukraine Security Service (SBU) claimed the last attack on the structure.
“Well, there was an explosion, nothing has been damaged, the bridge operates, the kyiv regime continues its attempts to attack objects of peaceful infrastructure,” Peskov said in a briefing. “The Russian part takes appropriate precautions.”
The SBU said that it has attacked the bridge – which connects the Crimea occupied to the Krasnodar Krai region in Russia and is a leading symbol of Moscow control over the occupied peninsula – with submarine explosives early on Tuesday, in an operation that “lasted several months”.
The SBU said that the explosion “seriously damaged” the “underwater supports of the batteries”. The official bridge account said that the structure had been “temporarily closed” after the explosion.
This video taking from a sequence of documents published by the Ukrainian security service on June 3, 2025, will show the explosion of the Kerch Strait Bridge connecting Crimea to Russia.
Handout / Ukrainian Security Service / AFP V
The long -term strikes that disturbed Trump continued. Ukraine reported that 95 Russian drones have launched into the country during the night, 61 of which were slaughtered or neutralized. The impacts have been recorded in seven locations, Air Force said.
The Russian Defense Ministry said its forces had shot down seven Ukrainian drones overnight.
The United States Embassy in Ukraine published a security alert on Wednesday warning Americans of the growing intensity of Russian attacks. The embassy urged American citizens to “show appropriate caution” and be ready to “take shelter” if an air alert is announced.
Ellie Kaufman, ABC News, Oleksiy Pshemyskiy, Natalia Popova and Will Gretsky contributed to this report.
