US President Donald Trump said he will speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday (March 18).”I’ll be speaking to President Putin on Tuesday. A lot of work’s been done over the weekend,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One during a late flight back to the Washington area from Florida.
“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end. Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance,” Trump said.
It would be the second publicised call between the two leaders since Trump began his second term in January. Trump and Putin spoke in February and agreed to start high-level talks over ending the war in Ukraine.Trump is trying to win Putin’s support for a 30-day ceasefire proposal that Ukraine accepted last week, as both sides continued trading heavy aerial strikes through the weekend and Russia moved closer to ejecting Ukrainian forces from their months-old foothold in the western Russian region of Kursk.
“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end. Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance,” Trump said.
It would be the second publicised call between the two leaders since Trump began his second term in January. Trump and Putin spoke in February and agreed to start high-level talks over ending the war in Ukraine.Trump is trying to win Putin’s support for a 30-day ceasefire proposal that Ukraine accepted last week, as both sides continued trading heavy aerial strikes through the weekend and Russia moved closer to ejecting Ukrainian forces from their months-old foothold in the western Russian region of Kursk.
Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff said on CNN’s “State of the Union”, “I think the two presidents are going to have a really good and positive discussion this week.”
Trump’s first call to Putin came after Witkoff travelled to Russia to bring home Marc Fogel, an American history teacher the US had deemed wrongfully detained.
One day after the prisoner swap, Trump announced that he spoke to Putin and said their call was “lengthy and highly productive”.
With inputs from Agencies
First Published: Mar 17, 2025 10:21 am IS
