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President Donald Trump spoke by phone on Wednesday to Russian President Vladimir Putin in their first publicized call since Trump returned to the White House, breaking a years-long silence between the Oval Office and the Kremlin as the U.S. leader kicked off a bid to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Trump had warm words for the Russian leader — who has ruled Russia for 25 years and has repeatedly invaded neighboring nations and killed, imprisoned or exiled his most formidable opposition — as he declared that the two men would visit each other’s countries and “agreed to work together, very closely.”

Trump, who also spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky later in the day, said he and Putin would probably meet without Zelensky in Saudi Arabia “in the not-too-distant future.”

“I think President Putin wants peace, and President Zelensky wants peace. And I want peace,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “I just want to see people stop getting killed. We’re very far away from that particular war, but that’s a vicious war.”

The call, which the Kremlin said lasted nearly 90 minutes, illustrated the deepening alliance between Trump and Putin in ways that are likely to unsettle Zelensky. In offering the first outline of his vision for a peace deal, Trump focused heavily on the terms that Russia cares most about, and he appeared to rule out NATO membership for Ukraine while placing the bulk of the burden for defending it on Europe.

“I don’t think it’s practical to have it, personally,” Trump said of Ukraine’s efforts to join NATO. “They’ve been saying that for a long time that Ukraine cannot go into NATO, and I’m okay with that. I just want the war [to end] whether they are or they’re not.”

Trump’s declarations offered major concessions to Putin even before the negotiation has formally begun. Putin has long sought to block Ukraine from NATO, and even if Trump had no intention of allowing Kyiv into the alliance, he could have preserved the possibility as a bargaining chip. Putin also has wanted to negotiate about Ukraine’s future directly with a U.S. leader over Kyiv’s head — a coup Trump also appeared to hand him on Wednesday.

Trump also said that he agreed with comments made earlier in the day by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who told NATO allies that Ukraine’s stated goal of reclaiming its full internationally recognized territory was “unrealistic.”

Trump has suggested he doesn’t expect Ukraine to reclaim its full territory in the peace deal. But he has said an end to the fighting is more important than Ukraine’s regaining all its land.

Trump and his administration have not made clear precisely what they want Russia to do in any peace deal. But they acknowledge that Russia will be able to remain in at least some of the territory it has captured from Ukraine in exchange for halting the war. They say Ukraine will need security guarantees to give it stability and the incentive to set down its arms, and they expect Europe to be responsible for the bulk of those guarantees.

Trump declined several times to say what concessions he expected Russia to make after invading a neighboring country. “I’m not going to tell you my plan. I can just tell you, we’ve made a lot of progress,” he said, saying both sides were eager for the fighting to halt.

“I think we’ll probably end up at some point getting a ceasefire in the not-too-distant future,” he said.

In the highly charged choreography of diplomacy with an adversarial leader, the Trump-Putin call was likely to upset Kyiv, since President Joe Biden made a mantra of coordinating closely with Ukrainian leaders before any contacts with Russian officials. This time, Trump spoke first to Putin and afterward called Zelensky to loop him in on the conversation. Trump and Zelensky met in Paris in December.

Asked whether there was a risk of freezing Zelensky out of the conversations involving his own country, Trump responded, “No, I don’t think so.” But in a sign of potential peril for the Ukrainian president that backing from a major ally is softening, Trump then added: “As long as he’s there. But at some point you’re going to have to have elections, too.”

“You know, his poll numbers aren’t particularly great, to put it mildly,” Trump added.

Putin has long sought to have a direct negotiation with Washington about Ukraine’s future, since he has argued that Ukraine is within Moscow’s sphere of influence and that it has been used as a tool by NATO and the West, something Ukrainian leaders hotly say ignores their nation’s desire to modernize and integrate more fully with Europe.

The call came a day after Russia freed a U.S. citizen, Marc Fogel, who had been imprisoned for 3½ years, into the custody of Steve Witkoff, a close Trump friend, real estate developer and the U.S. leader’s Middle East envoy.

Trump said he had asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, national security adviser Michael Waltz and Witkoff to lead the discussions. Notably absent from the list was the hawkish retired general Keith Kellogg, whom Trump appointed during the transition as his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia and who has been working on a peace plan. Both Kellogg and Vice President JD Vance are headed to Munich this week to meet with senior European policymakers about the peace efforts.

“As for General Keith Kellogg, he remains a critical part of this team in this effort,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “He’s played a tremendous role in getting the negotiations to this point, and he’s very much still part of the Trump administration.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Putin “mentioned the need to eliminate the root cause of the conflict and agreed with Trump that a long-term settlement can be achieved through peaceful negotiations. The Russian president also supported one of the main theses of the American head of state, that the time has come for our countries to work together.”

Zelensky posted a statement on his Telegram account confirming the conversation with Trump, which he said focused on achieving peace, technological capabilities including drone use, and the two nations’ ability to work together.

“President Trump informed me of the details of his conversation with Putin,” Zelensky wrote, adding that he was “grateful” for the call. “Ukraine wants peace more than anyone. We are defining our joint steps with America to stop Russian aggression and guarantee a reliable, lasting peace. As President Trump said, let’s get it done.”

But further pressuring Zelensky, Trump noted later in the day that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was en route to Kyiv to try to secure sources of repayment of money the United States has provided in Ukraine’s war effort.

“He’s going there to get a document done where we’re going to be assured that we’re going to, in some form, get this money back,” he said. “Because we’re putting up far more money than Europe, and Europe is in far more danger than we are.”

He said they will ask for natural resources such as rare earth metals, oil and gas to secure against the hundreds of billions in funding.

Trump has demanded that Putin put an end to the war, which started in February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine without provocation. But Trump has offered few concrete indications about how he would foster a breakthrough, and some world leaders are worried he could push Kyiv into a deal that would simply give Russia time to rest, rearm and reinvade.

In his first term, Trump often had sharper words for Washington’s friends than for its foes, and at a 2018 meeting with Putin, he sided with the Russian leader over U.S. intelligence agencies’ claim that the Kremlin tried to sway the 2016 election. During the 2024 campaign, Trump declared he would end the Ukraine war in less than 24 hours — worrying Kyiv that he would do so on Putin’s terms.

Wednesday’s phone call marks an important breakthrough for Putin, ending nearly three years of near-isolation from Western leaders imposed by the Biden administration. The last time Putin met a U.S. president was at a summit in Geneva with Biden in June 2021, eight months before the Russian leader’s invasion of Ukraine. Biden engaged in a flurry of calls with Putin in late 2021 and early 2022, attempting to dissuade him from invading, at a time when Russia insistently denied plans to do so. But there has been silence since.

Trump and Putin also spoke in November, shortly after Trump’s election victory, according to people familiar with the call who at the time spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. During the conversation, Trump warned Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine. The Kremlin later denied that the call took place.

Since he took office Jan. 20, Trump has repeatedly been evasive about his contacts with Putin when pressed by reporters, refusing to make clear whether he had spoken to Putin since his inauguration. The reasons have been unclear.

“I don’t want to talk about it, if we are talking,” he told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday. “I don’t want to tell you about our conversation. It’s too early. But I do believe we’re making progress.”

Putin recently told a Russian journalist that he was ready to engage, echoing Trump’s false allegations that the 2020 election was rigged and claiming that he might not have invaded Ukraine had Trump still been in the White House then. The comments seemed calculated to flatter Trump’s ego.

“I have always had a businesslike, at the same time pragmatic and trusting relationship with the current U.S. president,” Putin said. “I cannot but agree with him that if he had been president, if he had not had his victory stolen from him in 2020, then maybe there would not have been the crisis in Ukraine that emerged in 2022. We are ready for negotiations on Ukrainian issues.”

In any peace deal, Trump is expected to support an agreement where Russia retains control of some or all of the Ukrainian territory it has captured since 2022. Russia wants to lock Kyiv out of the NATO defense alliance.

Zelensky said last month that he would welcome negotiations and a peace deal, so long as Ukraine has a full role in the talks. He said that he had “good meetings” with Trump in recent months and that he supports the effort to reach peace.

“I’m confident he has great chances,” Zelensky told reporters in Kyiv. “And we believe he can succeed. But this can only happen with Ukraine. Otherwise, it simply won’t work. Because Russia does not want to end the war, and Ukraine does.”

Any deal, according to Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, would be judged on the extent to which it buttresses Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty against potential Russian aggression in the future.

“While this war is about territory and its control, at the heart of the conflict is Russia’s determination to deny Ukraine long-term independence and security,” Freedman wrote in a recent analysis. “This sets the standard against which any eventual deal will be judged and the issues that will still have to be addressed if there is no deal.”

Even if negotiators reach a ceasefire to prevent further bloodshed, a full peace deal would take much longer and might never be reached, given the complexities of the issues, he wrote.

With the phone call between Trump and Putin expected to pave the way for a face-to-face meeting, Russian officials have taken a maximalist approach on Ukraine peace talks, insisting on Putin’s conditions for peace set down in June — including that Ukraine renounce plans to join NATO; recognize Russian sovereignty over five Ukrainian regions, including areas not occupied by Russia; and begin a military withdrawal.

Trump said there were no conditions set for a meeting with Putin.

“We expect that he’ll come here, and I’ll go there, and we’re going to meet also, probably in Saudi Arabia,” he said.

Asked whether Zelensky would be included in the meeting in Saudi Arabia, he responded, “Probably we’ll have a first meeting, and then we’ll see what we can do about the second.”

Dixon reported from Riga, Latvia. Mary Ilyushina in Berlin; Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia; and David L. Stern and Serhii Korolchuk in Kyiv contributed to this report.

Excerpts: The washington post