After Putin call, Trump says Russia and Ukraine to negotiate ceasefire ‘immediately’

US President Donald Trump spoke to Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Monday about peace in Ukraine after Washington said there was an impasse over ending Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II and that the United States may have to walk away.

President Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022, triggering the gravest confrontation between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, had repeatedly called for an end to the “bloodbath” in Ukraine, which his administration casts as a proxy war between the United States and Russia.

Under pressure from Trump, delegates from the warring countries met last week in Istanbul for the first time since 2022, after Putin proposed direct talks and Europeans and Ukraine demanded an immediate ceasefire.

A White House official said the call was under way. Putin was speaking from Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi while Trump was in Washington.

Shortly before the call, US Vice-President J.D. Vance told reporters that Washington recognised there was an impasse in ending the war – and that if Moscow was not willing to engage, then eventually the United States would have to say it was not its war.