Ukraine war briefing: Trump says he ‘didn’t make any progress’ with Putin after call

US President Donald Trump said on Thursday that a phone call earlier in the day with Vladimir Putin resulted in no progress at all on efforts to end the war in Ukraine, while a Kremlin aide said the Russian president reiterated that Moscow would keep pushing to solve the conflict’s “root causes.” The two leaders did not discuss a recent pause in some US weapons shipments to Kyiv during the nearly hour-long conversation, according to a readout provided by Putin aide Yuri Ushakov. US attempts to end Russia’s war in Ukraine through diplomacy have largely stalled, and Trump has come under increased pressure – including from some Republicans – to increase pressure on Putin to negotiate in earnest. “I didn’t make any progress with him at all,” Trump told reporters in brief comments at an airbase outside Washington, before departing for a campaign-style event in Iowa. Putin, for his part, has continued to assert he will stop his invasion only if the conflict’s “root causes” have been addressed – Russian shorthand for the issue of Nato enlargement and western support for Ukraine.

Within hours of the call’s conclusion, an apparent Russian drone attack sparked a fire in an apartment building in a northern suburb of Kyiv. In Kyiv itself, witnesses reported explosions and sustained heavy fire overnight as air defence units battled drones over the capital, while Russian shelling killed five in the eastern part of the country.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters in Denmark earlier in the day that he hopes to speak to Trump as soon as Friday about the ongoing pause in some weapons shipments, which was first disclosed earlier this week. The diplomatic back-and-forth comes as the US has paused shipments of certain critical weapons to Ukraine due to low stockpiles, just as Ukraine faces a Russian summer offensive and increasingly frequent attacks on civilian targets.

A senior commander meanwhile warned that the death of an experienced Ukrainian F-16 fighter pilot in battle against Russian drones showed the high-risk tactics Kyiv will increasingly adopt if it is unable to obtain critical new air defences. Dozens of people have been killed during intensifying Russian airstrikes on Ukrainian cities in recent weeks, a trend officials have said will worsen if Kyiv’s allies do not step up supplies of critical munitions. At the funeral for fighter pilot Maksym Ustymenkoin, Oleh Zakharchuk, deputy commander of Ukraine’s western air command said: “Everyone must understand that there is no such thing as enough weapons. If we cannot use the missiles because we do not get them, then it will be very difficult.”

Russia killed two people in an airstrike on the central Ukrainian city of Poltava on Thursday and damaged a military draft office there in what Kyiv said was a concerted campaign to disrupt recruitment for its war effort. The strike on Poltava, which also injured 47 people and caused a fire at the city’s main draft office, followed a drone attack on Monday near a recruitment centre in Kryvyi Rih. Both cities are regional capitals. “We understand that their [Russia’s] goal is to disrupt the mobilisation process,” Vitaliy Sarantsev, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s ground forces, told Ukraine’s public broadcaster.

The Russian military said Thursday it had captured the village of Milove in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, opening a new front on their shared border. Ukraine did not immediately comment on Russia’s claim. Milove lies on a section of the border that Moscow’s forces had not penetrated since their offensive began in 2022, and was home to several hundred people before the conflict.

The US company Techmet is likely to bid in the first pilot project of the Ukraine-US joint Reconstruction Investment Fund on a lithium mine in the centre of the country, Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister said on Thursday. Yulia Svyrydenko, writing on Facebook, reported on a meeting between Zelenskyy and US businesses, with much of the focus on the fund, meant to exploit Ukrainian minerals and rare earths. Svyrydenko said Ukraine hoped to have three pilot projects up and running in the first 18 months of operation, including the lithium mine in Kirovohrad region.

A deputy commander of the Russian navy who had previously led one of the military’s most notorious brigades was killed near the frontline with Ukraine, Moscow confirmed. Maj Gen Mikhail Gudkov, who was responsible for Russia’s marine units, was killed on Wednesday in a Ukrainian missile attack on a field headquarters in the Kursk region, amid reports the position had been revealed by poor security.

An explosion Thursday killed a former official in the Russian-occupied eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, local Moscow-installed authorities said. There have been a series of assassinations in occupied Ukraine and inside Russia during Moscow’s full-scale offensive that have been linked to – or claimed by – Kyiv’s security services. “Today, as a result of a vile attack in the centre of Luhansk, the former head of the administration of our regional capital, Manolis Pilavov, was killed,” the Russian-backed head of the region, Leonid Pasechnik, said on Telegram.