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Western leaders await the outcome of a phone call between the US and Russian presidents in a fresh bid to resolve the conflict started by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
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Donald Trump is expected to grill Vladimir Putin on whether he is “serious” about peace in crunch talks to secure a ceasefire.
The crucial phone call, which got underway at around 3:30 UK time, comes after Trump last week vowed to meet Putin “as soon as we can” during a diplomatic fiasco prompted by the Russian president shunning peace talks in Turkey.
Putin is speaking over an encrypted line from Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi while Trump is in Washington.
Earlier US vice president JD Vance told reporters the administration realised there was an “impasse” that needed to be resolved to bring an end to the conflict, as he prepared to leave Rome after meeting with Pope Leo XIV.
“And I think the president’s going to say to President Putin: ‘Look, are you serious? Are you real about this?’”.
The US president’s renewed effort to end the war in Ukraine also includes calls to Nato leaders and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, as Mr Trump looks to speed up ceasefire efforts.
But the Trump administration has insisted Russia and the US are the only ones who can bring an end to the conflict.
Meanwhile, Kyiv’s military intelligence agency has warned Russia could test-launch its intercontinental ballistic missile in a drill to intimidate Ukraine.
Russia has outlawed Amnesty International, designating it an “undesirable organisation” and criminalising involvement with the human rights group in the country.
This move, announced Monday by the Russian Prosecutor General’s office, further intensifies the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent, which has escalated dramatically since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The ban effectively shuts down Amnesty’s operations within Russia and threatens anyone cooperating with or supporting the organisation with prosecution.
Our reporter Albert Toth has the news:
The White House has confirmed that a phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is currently underway.
Putin is speaking from Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi while Trump was in Washington.
Let’s turn our attention to near the Ukrainian frontline, where Russian attacks have far-from let up despite Washington’s push for peace and today’s Trump-Putin phone call.
On Sunday, Kyiv said Russia fired a record of 273 drones at Ukraine, killing one woman. On Monday, it said a further 112 were fired.
Photos shared by Ukraine’s emergency services shows blazes tearing through the buildings struck by Russia weaponry.
Around three people have been killed in the past day, including two in the southern Kherson region and one in the Donetsk region. Injuries were also recorded in Zaporizhzhia, Sumy, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk.
Despite repeated diplomatic efforts towards a ceasefire, Russian drone attacks on civilian areas in Ukraine remain unrelenting.
Here are some pictures of Russia’s attack on the Chuguiv district of the Kharkiv region:
The phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is now underway, a White House official has confirmed.
We’ll bring you all the latest lines as they come in.
The phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin should now be underway , if it did indeed begin at the scheduled time of 3pm BST.
It’s the first public call between the pair in more than two months, after they held a two-hour phone call on March 18. According to some reports, however, they have held a number of phone calls which were not publicised since Mr Trump took office January.
The March phone call, despite its length, did not appear to bring the US president any close to his goal.
Trump had, at the time, began proposing a 30-day unconditional ceasefire to allow for Moscow and Kyiv to hash out the terms of a peace agreement. This proposal was rejected by Putin.
Not only did the Russian president refuse to bow down to Mr Trump’s demands, the US president even issued some warm words afterwards.
“We had a great call,” Donald Trump told Fox News, with special envoy Steve Witkoff adding: “I would commend President Putin for all he did today on that call to move his country close to a final peace deal.”
The call did, however, lay the seeds for an apparent ceasefire on energy and infrastructure – but this was a ceasefire which Russia was accused of breaching hundreds of times by Kyiv and its western allies. Moscow also accused Kyiv of breaking the truce terms.
As a busy day of diplomacy gets underway in Washington to push for peace in Ukraine, European leaders have vowed to support Kyiv for “as long as it takes and as intensely as needed”.
EU commission chief Ursula von der Leyen and council chief Antonia Costa arrived in London for the first bilateral EU-UK summit since Brexit.
Following the summit, they made a joint statement which addressed peave in Ukraine, reaffirming their firm support for Kyiv’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity
During their first bilateral summit after Brexit, the EU and the UK have called on Russia to fully and unconditionally cease fire in Ukraine.
The statement also called for a a tribunal of Russia’s war.
“We are committed to ensuring full accountability for war crimes and other serious crimes committed in connection with Russia’s war of aggression, including by the establishment of a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine.”
More comments are through from US vice president JD Vance, who spoke with reporters before boarding a flight in Rome after meeting Pope Leo on Monday.
“I think honestly that President Putin, he doesn’t quite know how to get out of the war,” Mr Vance said, adding that he had just spoken to Trump.
He said it “takes two to tango. I know the President’s willing to do that, but if Russia is not willing to do that, then we’re eventually just going to say, this is not our war.”
Washington will be “more than open to walking away”, Mr Vance added. Washington is “not going to spin its wheels here. We want to see outcomes.
“We’re going to try to end it, but if we can’t end it, we’re eventually going to say: ‘You know what? That was worth a try, but we’re not doing anymore.'”
Our reporter Tom Watling has been discussing the upcoming phone call with experts:
We have some pre-emptive analysis of today’s call between US president Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.
Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), says today’s call between the two leaders risks shifting Mr Trump back in an “anti-Ukraine direction”.
The US president is known to have quickly shifting opinions, often in line with the last person to whom he has spoken. His previous comments about Ukraine being responsible for the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion came shortly after the US president spoke to Mr Putin on the phone in February, and just a day after a Russian delegation met with the Trump administration in Saudi Arabia.
A public feud between Mr Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky later that month saw Kyiv’s leader prematurely kicked out of the White House.
After Mr Trump met with Mr Zelensky at the funeral of Pope Francis in April, his tone shifted again to become more pro-Kyiv.
Now there are concerns Mr Trump’s views could shift again.
“These calls [between Trump and Putin] tend to be terrible for Ukraine,” says Mr Bergmann.
“There is a danger that Trump buys Putin’s talking points and that shifts him in an anti-Ukraine direction, which is a path he is already prone to follow.
“I doubt this call leads to any breakthroughs toward peace. But it may help Russia’s efforts to convince Trump to blame Ukraine for the war continuing.”
We’re little over 20 minutes away from the scheduled phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and noises are emerging from the Trump administration on what to expect.
US vice president JD Vance, who has been in Rome meeting with the new Pope Leo XIV, said Mr Trump is going to question whether Putin is serious about achieving peace.
“We realize there’s a bit of an impasse here. And I think the president’s going to say to (Russian) President (Vladimir) Putin: ‘Look, are you serious? Are you real about this?'” Mr Vance told reporters as he prepared to leave Italy, adding that he had just spoken with Mr Trump.
In Washington, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is asked whether Mr Trump meeting the Russian president is still on the table.
He is “open” to it, she says, adding: “I think everything’s on the table. Yes. And again, I won’t get ahead of the President and any commitments or decisions, but certainly it’s something he’s been discussing.”
Karoline Leavitt says Donald Trump has “grown weary and frustrated” with “both sides” of the conflict, as he prepares to hold phone calls with both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky this afternoon.
“The president has made it clear his goal is to see a ceasefire and to see this conflict come to an end,” Ms Leavitt says.
“He has grown weary and frustrated with both sides of the conflict. The president and his team have put an enormous amount of effort into solving this very complicated war that, again, began because of the previous administration’s weakness.”
She had previously blasted the “incompetence and weakness” of Joe Biden – who it yesterday emerged had been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer – and his administration.
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