Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, met the US vice-president, JD Vance, and secretary of state, Marco Rubio, to prepare for a planned call on Monday with Donald Trump over a way to end three years of war in Ukraine.
The encounter took place on the sidelines of Pope Leo’s inauguration on Sunday.
Trump is also scheduled to speak with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
However, underlining the huge challenges facing efforts to end the war, the meeting came just hours after Russia launched its largest drone strike of the war in Ukraine.
Ukrainian intelligence has also warned that Moscow may be imminently planning to test-fire a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile “to intimidate” Kyiv and its western backers.
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said it believed the test would involve an RS-24 Yars missile with a claimed range of more than 10,000km equipped with a training warhead.
There was no immediate response from Moscow to the accusation.
The meeting between Zelenskyy and Vance was the first since the two clashed during talks at the White House in February, and lasted about 40 minutes.
Zelenskyy described the meeting as “good” and released pictures of Ukrainian and US officials sitting outside at a round table and smiling.
“I reaffirmed that Ukraine is ready to be engaged in real diplomacy and underscored the importance of a full and unconditional ceasefire as soon as possible,” Zelenskyy added.
A senior Ukrainian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, added that Zelenskyy and Vance discussed “the situation on the front, preparations for [Trump’s phone conversations on Monday], the possibility of sanctions against Russia if there are no results, a ceasefire”.
The escalating diplomatic efforts come after the first direct talks between Moscow and Kyiv in years – held in Istanbul on Friday – failed to yield a ceasefire, and as European leaders, threatening new sanctions against Moscow, are uniting around efforts to persuade an erratic US president that Putin is not serious about peace.
The leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Poland planned to speak to Trump before the US and Russian presidents speak on Monday, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said on Sunday.
“I spoke with Marco Rubio, including about the call tomorrow. We agreed that we will speak again with the four state leaders and the US president in preparation for this conversation [with Putin],” Merz told reporters in Rome.
The EU chief, Ursula von der Leyen, said that next week would be “crucial” for Ukraine’s future, in advance of the phone call between Trump and Putin.
“What is important now is certainly that we push, that things are moving forward, and I think the next week will be crucial on that,” she said.
Trump on Saturday said that he would speak by phone with Putin to end the “bloodbath” in Ukraine, a day after the first direct talks between Moscow and Kyiv in more than three years did not yield a ceasefire.
Keir Starmer on Sunday discussed the war in Ukraine with leaders of the US, Italy, France and Germany, a Downing Street spokesperson said.
Looking ahead to Trump’s call with Putin on Monday, the leaders discussed the need for an unconditional ceasefire and for the Russian president to take peace talks seriously, the spokesperson said.
They also discussed the use of sanctions if Russia failed to engage seriously in a ceasefire and peace talks, the spokesperson added.
The UK foreign minister, David Lammy, on Saturday accused Moscow of obfuscating after talks between Ukraine and Russia on a possible ceasefire ended in less than two hours and Trump said “nothing could happen” until he had met Putin directly.
On Sunday Macron said he had spoken with Trump, Starmer, Merz and Giorgia Meloni about Ukraine.
“Tomorrow, President Putin must show he wants peace by accepting the 30-day unconditional ceasefire proposed by President Trump and backed by Ukraine and Europe,” he wrote on X.
The largest known Russian drone attack since full-scale war began in 2022 killed a woman in the Kyiv region and wounded at least three people, Ukrainian authorities said early on Sunday.
The attack came two days after Ukraine and Russia held their first direct talks since 2022 and a day before the planned phone call between Trump and Putin.
Russia launched the 273 drones before 8am local time, targeting chiefly the Kyiv region and the Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk regions in the east of the country, Ukraine’s air force said.
The attack killed a 28-year-old woman in the capital region and wounded at least three people, including a four-year-old child.
Data provided by the air force showed this to be Russia’s largest drone attack on Ukraine of the war. On the eve of the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 23 February, Moscow launched a then-record 267 drones.
According to the air force, 128 of the drones disappeared from radar during the attack, either crashing from software failures or fuel exhaustion, or because they were decoys without explosives. Another 88 were shot down.
Russia and Ukraine have both made increasing use of decoy drones in swarms to try to overwhelm air defences. Other decoys are designed to appear larger than they are on radar systems.
The large scale of the attack, despite its relatively low impact, is far more significant in terms of the message it sends before Monday’s planned phone call between Putin and Trump, who has demanded an “end to the bloodshed” in Ukraine.
