CNN
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The high-stakes call between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin expected on Tuesday comes as the White House insists it is closing in on a temporary ceasefire deal to pause the war between Russia and Ukraine.
But the call will be a key test of whether Trump, who’s largely echoed Putin’s view of the war since their call last month, can achieve his campaign trail promise of bringing the war to an end – and whether his friendliness toward Russia has paid off.
A key priority for the call, sources familiar with the talks told CNN, is securing an agreement on concessions Russia is willing to make – including whether it’s willing to withdraw forces from territory it seized in the past three years since invading Ukraine.
Trump himself suggested as much while speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday, saying that US negotiators have discussed “dividing up certain assets.”
“We’ll be talking about land. A lot of land is a lot different than it was before the war, as you know. We’ll be talking about land, we’ll be talking about power plants, that’s a big question,” Trump said.
The Kremlin has said that Putin has been readying himself for the discussion with Trump, having his staff work out talking points on Russia’s position.
Negotiations to end the war kicked off after Trump and Putin spoke by phone last month, marking a resumption of communication after a long period of silence between the White House and the Kremlin. Since then, the president hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for an Oval Office meeting that ended with Trump and Vice President JD Vance shouting at him and asking the Ukrainians to leave, followed by the US temporarily pausing military assistance and intelligence sharing.
Weeks of intense back-and-forth negotiations between top US officials — led by Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz — and top Ukrainian and Russian officials led to a breakthrough, with the announcement of a US-led ceasefire proposal. After Zelensky said last week that his country had accepted the 30-day proposal, the US made clear the onus was on Russia to agree, with Trump saying, “Russia holds all the cards.”
Efforts to bring Russia closer to an agreement intensified with Witkoff’s visit to Moscow on Thursday, where he met directly with Putin for several hours, CNN previously reported. Witkoff told CNN the meeting with Putin — his second known meeting with the Russian president this year — was “positive” and that the two sides had “narrowed the differences between them.”
Putin believes “philosophically in a truce,” Witkoff argued, after the Russian leader laid out numerous reservations he had.
Witkoff later flew to Florida to brief Trump on the discussions, and the president was so encouraged by Witkoff’s readout, the sources said, that he directed his team to begin preparations for a phone call with Putin.
Over the weekend, Rubio spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
“We are on the 10-yard line of peace,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Monday, adding that the US has “never been closer to a peace deal than we are in this moment.”
A White House official reiterated that sentiment in a conversation with CNN, arguing that just a week ago they were “hundreds of miles apart, now we’re a couple hundred yards apart.” The official described Tuesday’s Trump-Putin phone call as the “natural next step” in negotiations.
An in-person meeting between Trump and Putin, which Trump said last month he envisioned happening in the near future, is likely to come up during their conversation, the official added.
Trump and his team have repeatedly argued the fighting needs to stop before they can proceed to the far more complicated issues that need to be resolved in a longer-term peace deal, like drawing territorial lines and negotiating security support for Ukraine.
But Putin has publicly shared skepticism over the US proposal, with the Russian president saying last week that Ukraine must agree to specific concessions, such as halting mobilization and any training of its troops and that other nations must stop supplying weapons to Kyiv during the ceasefire.
One of his top negotiators, Yuriy Ushakov, dismissed the US ceasefire idea as “nothing more than a temporary respite for the Ukrainian military.”
Asked by CNN about Putin’s reservations and whether he was playing for time, Rubio said Friday: “We’re not going to make our foreign policy decisions on the basis of what a leader says, simply says at a press conference.”
“This is going to play out the way things of this nature and caliber have traditionally and normally play out,” he added, “and that is with the leaders of the countries involved speaking, not in front of the cameras, not in front of the media, but in these negotiations that happen.”
Senior US officials have repeatedly argued that any permanent off-ramp from the Russia-Ukraine war will include all sides making concessions, but they have also been reticent to publicly discuss details.
After meeting with the Russians in Riyadh last month, Waltz said, “The practical reality is that there is going to be some discussion of territory.” Asked by CNN if it would be acceptable for Russia to retain territory it has annexed since 2022, Waltz said it was something “to be discussed.”
Rubio, ahead of a meeting with the Ukrainians last week, said they were in “listening mode” and “not going to be sitting in a room drawing lines on a map,” but wanted to “get a general sense of what concessions are in the realm of the possible.”
In an interview Sunday, Waltz was asked if “Russia could be given the Donbas in addition to hanging onto Crimea” – two Ukrainian regions it has occupied.
“Are we going to drive every Russian off of every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea?” he told ABC News. “We can talk about what’s right and wrong. And we also have to talk about the reality of the situation on the ground. And that’s what we are doing through diplomacy, through shuttle diplomacy, through proximity talks,” he said.
Also likely to a point of discussion with Putin will be the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine, which has been under Russian control since early in the war. Ukraine has repeatedly demanded that it be handed back, arguing that leaving it in Russian hands risks a radiological disaster.
The facility is Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, but it hasn’t supplied power to Ukraine since Moscow took over the facility.
Another issue that American officials view as critical to a final agreement is access to Black Sea ports, which have been a consistent point of conflict. Russia has targeted Ukraine’s ports, while Ukraine has worked to push back Russian naval forces based in the Crimean port of Sevastopol.
