By Ryan Morgan
Contributing Writer
Following phone calls with his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts on Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced Russia has agreed to “start negotiations immediately” to end the war in Ukraine.
“I just had a lengthy and highly productive phone call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia,” Trump announced in a Wednesday post on his Truth Social media account. The call marks Trump’s first known conversation with Putin since taking office.
Trump said he and Putin discussed ways to end the war in Ukraine and improve relations between Russia and the United States.
“First, as we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the war with Russia/Ukraine,” Trump wrote.
So far, the Russian side has provided few additional details about the call between Trump and Putin.
In remarks carried by Russia’s state-sponsored TASS news agency, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the two leaders spoke for about an hour and a half.
Immediately after speaking with the Russian leader, Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“The conversation went very well,” Trump said in a second Truth Social post recounting his call with Zelenskyy. “He, like President Putin, wants to make PEACE.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also met with Zelenskyy in person on Wednesday.
Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will lead another U.S. delegation to meet with Zelenskyy in Germany on Friday.
Putin and Trump’s phone conversation comes a day after the Trump administration secured the release of Marc Fogel, who had been held in Russia since 2021 over a marijuana possession charge.
Meeting with Ukraine’s network of international backers in Belgium on Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that retaking all territory that Ukraine has lost to Russia since 2014 is an unrealistic war goal and insisted that Europe must take on a greater share of the burden of supporting Ukraine.
“We want, like you, a sovereign and prosperous Ukraine. But we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” Hegseth said as he met with the Ukraine Defense Contact Group.
Ukraine’s borders have been in flux since early 2014, when the country’s president at the time, Viktor Yanukovych, was driven from power. Yanukovych had been on friendly terms with the Russian government and had faced intense street demonstrations after rejecting an agreement to expand economic ties with the European Union in late 2013.
In February 2014, just days after Yanukovych fled Ukraine, Russian forces seized control over the Crimean Peninsula. Elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, pro-Russian secessionists sought to break from the post-Yanukovych Ukrainian government.
Russia and Ukraine have been in a direct full-scale conflict since February 2022, when Russian troops entered Ukraine in force. Since then, Russia has declared the annexation of four eastern Ukrainian provinces, and Russian forces continue to advance farther west.
With the third anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war approaching, Hegseth said President Donald Trump’s focus remains on bringing the fighting to an end.
“He intends to end this war by diplomacy and bringing both Russia and Ukraine to the table,” Hegseth said.
Along with sharing doubts that Ukraine can reverse Russia’s post-2014 territorial gains, he pushed back on Ukraine’s calls to join NATO as part of a broader security guarantee to end the war.
“The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement,” Hegseth said.
Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty, the foundational document of the NATO alliance, stipulates that the various alliance members are to treat an attack on one member as an attack on the whole alliance and commit to assisting the member that was attacked.
Putin has opposed Ukrainian membership in NATO and warned that this idea would put the alliance in direct conflict with Russia.
Hegseth said Ukraine’s backers may provide the country with their own security guarantees but not under the umbrella of NATO.
“Any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops. If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission, and they should not be covered under Article Five,” he said.
Hegseth further insisted that Ukraine’s European backers must begin to provide the bulk of future lethal and non-lethal aid for the embattled country.
Looking beyond the Russia-Ukraine war specifically, Hegseth reiterated Trump’s calls for other NATO members to increase their contributions to the alliance’s collective military capabilities.
NATO currently has a goal for each member to commit 2% of its annual gross domestic product to its military, but Hegseth said the spending goal should be raised to 5%.
A majority of the NATO member nations had lagged behind the 2% defense spending goal until just last year. Eight of the 31 alliance members are still behind the 2% goal.
Speaking with international leaders on Wednesday, Hegseth also warned that the United States must consider its own security concerns ahead of Europe’s.
“The United States faces consequential threats to our homeland. We must and we are focusing on the security of our own borders,” he said. “We also face a peer competitor in the communist Chinese with the capability and intent to threaten our homeland and core national interests in the Indo-Pacific.”
Ukraine’s international backers have speculated for months about continued U.S. support for Ukraine under Trump’s leadership.
Following Hegseth’s remarks on Wednesday, British Defense Secretary John Healey acknowledged the Trump administration’s concerns about the ongoing war in Ukraine and Europe’s contributions to the war effort.
“We hear your commitment to NATO, to Article Five, to a sovereign Ukraine, and to your defense partnership with Europe. We also hear your concerns on stepping up for Ukraine. We are and we will. On stepping up for European security, we are and we will,” Healey said.
Although Trump has called for negotiations to end the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, it’s not yet clear whether and to what degree U.S. support for Ukraine will continue as the fighting rages on.
Earlier this month, Trump raised the prospect of trading support for Ukraine for U.S. access to the country’s natural resources, particularly rare earth minerals. In an interview this week, Trump indicated that the idea to trade U.S. support for Ukrainian rare earth minerals was progressing. He said the United States stands to gain $500 billion in natural resources from Ukraine.
