Trump Says He And Putin Will Negotiate To End The War In Ukraine

President Donald Trump said that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin had a “lengthy and highly productive phone call” on Wednesday morning in which they agreed to work together “very closely” on a diplomatic resolution to the war in Ukraine and to visit one another’s countries.

The president’s long summation of the phone call, which came in a social media post, laid bare an astonishing shift in strategy, a desire to normalize relations with Russia despite its 2022 invasion of Ukraine — and Trump’s willingness to take Russia’s leader seriously about his shared desire to end the war that he launched without provocation.

“As we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine,” Trump wrote. “President Putin even used my very strong Campaign motto of, ‘COMMON SENSE.’"

Trump’s post repeated his desire to end the nearly three year war in Ukraine. But he spoke of initiating negotiations in bilateral terms — between the U.S. and Russia, treating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a lesser party.

Trump and Putin “also agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately, and we will begin by calling President Zelenskyy, of Ukraine, to inform him of the conversation, something which I will be doing right now,” Trump wrote.

After threatening Putin directly during his first days in office, Trump’s new posture appears to be what Ukraine supporters feared — a stark about-face for American foreign policy that is effectively the opposite of the approach taken by former President Joe Biden, who cut off diplomatic ties with Russia and prioritized close coordination with Zelenskyy and NATO allies.

As he said he would, Trump spoke with Zelenskyy following his call with Putin and posted another, albeit shorter, summation of the call on social media. “The conversation went very well,” the president said. “He, like President Putin, wants to make PEACE.”

Trump’s call with Putin came just as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told allies in Europe that the U.S. now views “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective.” He also appeared to give up the biggest point of leverage the West has over Russia in a negotiation, stating explicitly that the strongest security guarantee Ukraine could have — NATO membership — is, in the administration’s view, not “a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.”

In his post, Trump said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, national security adviser Mike Waltz and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff will oversee negotiations to resolve the Russia-Ukraine conflict.