President Donald Trump’s promises of a hasty end to the war in Ukraine were given a hard reality check Tuesday, with Russian officials saying that the latest round of ceasefire talks with the U.S. ended without a written agreement and the Kremlin continuing to bomb Ukrainian civilians.
The media had been briefed to expect a statement following discussions in Saudi Arabia, but no such written conclusion was released. In an interview with Russian state television, first deputy chairman of Russia’s defense committee Vladimir Chizhov blamed the position taken by Ukraine.
“They sat for 12 hours and seemed to have agreed on a joint statement,” Chizhov told Rossiya 24. “However this was not adopted due to Ukraine’s position,” he said, calling the hold up “very characteristic and symptomatic.”
While both sides have — in theory — agreed to a limited, 30-day ceasefire, Russian President Vladimir Putin has imposed conditions that would essentially constitute a Ukrainian surrender. Meanwhile Kyiv says the Kremlin is clearly uninterested in peace given that it continues to launch nightly mass drone attacks against its people.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters earlier Tuesday that there were no immediate plans for another call between presidents Putin and Trump.
Ukraine, meanwhile, is still counting the casualties from an attack a day earlier in the city of Sumy — on a dense residential area, a children’s hospital and a school — with authorities so far reporting 99 people injured including 23 children.
Russia fired 139 more Iran-designed “Shahed” drones into Ukraine overnight into Tuesday, Ukraine officials said. They added that while 78 were shot down, others caused damaged in the regions of Kharkiv, Sumy, Poltava, Kirovohrad, Kyiv, Cherkasy and Odessa.
“Instead of making hollow statements about peace, Russia must stop bombing our cities and end its war on civilians,” Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said in a statement Monday. “Any diplomacy with Moscow must be backed up by firepower, sanctions, and pressure.”
Three years after it was invaded by Putin, Ukraine has itself launched retaliatory strikes on targets related to the Kremlin’s war effort. On Monday the Russian Defense Ministry said it shot down a Ukrainian drone headed for an oil pumping depot that supplies the country’s energy exports.
“The Kiev regime continues to deliberately plan, prepare and carry out attacks on energy infrastructure,” the ministry said.
Russia and Ukraine have continued this mutual bombardment despite agreeing to a limited ceasefire in principle earlier this month. The Kremlin meanwhile has issued demands tantamount to a Ukrainian surrender.
There have been subtly differing statements about what this ceasefire might cover, with American readouts referring to “energy and infrastructure” and the Kremlin referring only to “energy infrastructure.”
U.S. and Russian negotiators have also presented starkly different accounts of how the talks were going.
While Moscow’s representatives have appeared circumspect, American officials have sounded optimistic about the talks in Saudi Arabia, even as a parallel ceasefire agreement brokered by the White House in Gaza has fallen apart.
One of the heads of Russia’s delegation in Riyadh, Grigorii Karasin, was more forthcoming, calling the negotiations “very useful.”
“We discussed everything, there was a busy, not an easy dialogue, but very useful for us and for the Americans,” he told Russia’s state-controlled TASS news agency Tuesday.
“Of course, not everything was resolved, not everything was agreed upon,” he added.
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday that territory and “lines of demarcation” were among the subjects discussed in Riyadh, as well as a proposal mooted by the U.S. to take control of a key nuclear plant in Ukraine.
“They are talking about ownership of the big nuclear power plant in particular,” he said. “Something like that would be fine with me,” he added, calling it a “great meeting.”
Meanwhile Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave his most expansive account yet of the remarkable Oval Office bust-up between him, Trump and Vice President JD Vance last month.
He told Time magazine in an interview published Monday that he “was defending the dignity of Ukraine” during that discussion.
