President Donald Trump’s phone chat with Russian President Vladimir Putin apparently did not go as well as he thought it did as the Kremlin seized the chance to twist the knife early Tuesday.
Hours after Trump bragged that Putin told him he was “impressed” by his moves in Iran, the Kremlin undermined the U.S. president’s version of the discussion.
“Trump didn’t ask about a ceasefire in Ukraine during his conversation with Putin,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, apparently pushing back on Trump’s claim that he’d urged his Russian counterpart to get “the Ukraine-Russia war over with.”
Most of the conversation focused on Iran, with Putin proposing ways to ease tensions and find a way out of the conflict, Peskov said. He declined to elaborate further on what Putin’s proposals entailed, saying only that “Russia would be glad” to lend its help in mediating the conflict.
The fact that Trump floated the idea of easing Russian oil sanctions just minutes after the phone call was only a coincidence, according to Peskov, who surmised that Trump was likely just reacting to the rattled world economy.
At the time of their conversation Monday, Trump and his aides had repeatedly shrugged off reports of Moscow providing Tehran with assistance in targeting U.S. positions in the region. It was not clear if the two broached that subject in their lengthy discussion.
Asked if there was any truth to those reports, Peskov offered no denial, saying instead, “We are not commenting.”
Trump, speaking at his golf resort in Doral, Florida, on Monday, had put a different spin on the conversation, saying he’d had a “good call” with Putin about the Russia-Ukraine conflict that has now entered its fifth year.
“We were talking about Ukraine, which is just a never-ending fight, and when his tremendous hatred between President Putin and President Zelensky, they can’t seem to get it together,” Trump said. “But I think it was a positive call on that subject.”
Putin aide Yuri Ushakov went even further in humiliating Trump in his version of the phone call. He stressed that Trump had been the one to initiate the call, phoning up the Russian leader to discuss a “number of highly important issues” on Monday.
Calling their chat “frank and constructive,” he went on to suggest the two leaders had perhaps missed each other.
“They had not spoken by telephone for quite some time–their previous conversation took place at the end of December 2025," Ushakov said.
“Today’s call, incidentally, lasted about an hour. The U.S. president noted that, as previously agreed, such communication should, of course, take place on a regular basis, and both leaders expressed their readiness for this.”
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump boasted that he could end the war between Russia and Ukraine within “24 hours” of being back in the White House. But Trump has now spent more than a year lamenting how difficult the negotiations have been to end the war, even as Putin’s top aides reportedly mock the U.S. leader in private for his eagerness to take the Russian president at his word.
