Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, urged Donald Trump to use the momentum of the Gaza ceasefire to broker peace in Ukraine, as the two leaders spoke by phone on Saturday.
Trump and Zelenskyy discussed Ukraine’s request for the US to allow the delivery of Tomahawk cruise missiles to bolster Kyiv’s ability to conduct long-range strikes inside Russia, among other issues, according to Axios.
This follows Trump’s suggestion that he had “sort of made a decision” about selling Tomahawks to Nato countries in order for them to be supplied to Ukraine.
“If a war can be stopped in one region, then surely other wars can be stopped as well – including the Russian war,” Zelenskyy wrote on Facebook, a day after Moscow launched a massive drone and missile attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure that triggered widespread blackouts in Kyiv and elsewhere.
“I informed President Trump about Russia’s attacks on our energy system – and I appreciate his willingness to support us,” Zelenskyy said on X, adding that they had a “very positive and productive” discussion on “concrete agreements” for strengthening Ukraine’s air defences.
The phone call took place amid mounting concern in Kyiv over both the increasing scale of Russian air attacks and Ukraine’s ability to counter ever more sophisticated aerial assaults involving hundreds of drones at a time, and more effective Russian countermeasures against Kyiv’s air defences.
The commander in chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi, warned that Russia was stepping up its air raids.
“New challenges await us ahead. Over the past month, the enemy has increased the number of air attack weapons and although our air defence is about 74% effective, we need to make additional efforts to cover the rear energy sector, critical infrastructure and logistics,” said Syrskyi.
Earlier this week, Russia launched 465 Shahed-type attack drones and decoy drones, as well as 32 cruise and ballistic missiles, against Ukraine.
The latest talks between Trump and Zelenskyy come amid ongoing discussions in Washington over whether to provide Ukraine with the Tomahawk cruise missiles Kyiv has long been seeking, a move Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has warned would be a “completely new, qualitatively new stage of escalation”.
The phone call between the two leaders comes amid a warming of relations between the US president and Zelenskyy.
The Ukrainian president said in his nightly address on Friday that Russia was taking advantage of the world being “almost entirely focused on the prospect of establishing peace in the Middle East”, and called for strengthening Ukraine’s air defence systems and tighter sanctions on Russia.
“Russian assets must be fully used to strengthen our defence and ensure recovery,” he said in the video, posted to X.
Meanwhile, the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, and Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said in a joint statement on Friday they were ready to coordinate and move toward using “the value of the immobilised Russian sovereign assets to support Ukraine’s armed forces and thus bring Russia to the negotiation table”.
They aimed to do this “in close cooperation with the United States,” the statement added.
