US President Donald Trump said he will speak with the leaders of Russia and Ukraine in separate calls on May 19 as a deadly Russian drone attack killed nine minibus passengers in Ukraine a day after the first direct peace talks in three years produced no breakthrough.
In a post on his Truth Social network on May 17, Trump said he would speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone on May 19 at 10 a.m. EST (4 p.m. CET).
"The subjects of the call will be...stopping the 'bloodbath' that is killing, on average, more than 5,000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers a week, and trade," Trump wrote, adding he would then speak with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and have a group call with Zelenskyy and "various members of NATO."
"Hopefully it will be a productive day, a cease-fire will take place, and this very violent war, a war that should never have happened, will end," he wrote.
A day before Ukrainian and Russian delegations held talks in Istanbul on May 16, Trump had said, "Nothing's going to happen until Putin and I get together," and after those talks ended without progress toward peace, Trump said he was seeking a meeting with Putin.
Russian Attack On Civilians In Ukraine
Earlier on May 17, a Russian drone strike hit a minibus carrying civilians in the Sumy region near the Russian border, killing nine people and wounding several others, Ukrainian authorities said.
The attack, less than 24 hours after the 90-minute talks in Istanbul, underscored the lack of progress. Ukraine accused Russia of making "unacceptable" demands.
Russia has rejected calls by Ukraine, European countries, and the United States for a 30-day cease-fire in the war, now well into its fourth year since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Multiple international media outlets cited unnamed Ukrainian officials who discussed what they said were Russia's demands at the May 16 talks in Istanbul, including the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from four mainland regions that are partially occupied by Russia and the renunciation of compensation claims.
The attack in the Sumy region was carried out with a drone, the Sumy regional military administration said. Ukraine's National Police charged that Russian forces deliberately targeted the vehicle, which was being used as an intercity bus and was hit near the town of Bilopillya, not far from the Russian border.
Images posted by the National Police on Telegram showed a mangled Mercedes minibus and debris scattered on the roadside. Most of the victims were women of retirement age, Bilopillya administration chief Yuriy Zarko said.
"This day will become Black Saturday in the history of our town," he said. Periods of mourning were announced in Billopillya and in the Sumy region, which is the site of frequent Russian attacks.
A surviving passenger, Andriy, lay in a hospital bed, his head and shoulder bandaged and bloodied cuts on his face. "When I raised my head [after the blast], the doors were completely gone. I saw a man under the [exit] in a pool of blood," he told independent regional outlet Kordon.Media.
"I started driving and there was a blast," the driver, Viktor Vovk, told Kordon.Media. "It triggered the airbags; they shot into my face. I left the bus. There was a person on the ground right next to the bus in awful shape. Another person was crying from inside for help. I got inside and carried [the person] out as they were still alive. That’s all I could do to help until the police and ambulance arrived."
"Total horror, I can’t find the words," he said.
Zelenskyy said preliminary reports indicated that a couple and their daughter were among the victims. He said seven people were being treated in hospitals, while other officials put the number of wounded at four.
"All the deceased were civilians. And the Russians could not have failed to understand what kind of vehicle they were targeting. This was a deliberate killing of civilians," Zelenskyy said in a post on X. "Yesterday, as on any other day of this war, there was an opportunity to cease fire. Ukraine has long been offering this -- a full and unconditional cease-fire in order to save lives."
There was no immediate comment from Russia, which claims it does not target civilians despite ample evidence to the contrary.
After the talks, Trump said a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin is needed to make progress in ending Europe's longest conflict since World War II.
"We have to get together," Trump told Fox News in an interview, saying he was optimistic about engaging with Putin but is ready to apply pressure on Russia if necessary. "I think we'll make a deal with Putin.... [I] will use leverage on Putin if I have to."
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on May 16 that a Trump-Putin meeting to discuss bilateral ties, Ukraine, and other matters is "certainly necessary" but would take time to prepare and should not be held unless it produces results.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke by phone on May 17. Rubio "emphasized President Trump's call for an immediate cease-fire," State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said.
Rubio told reporters in Rome that the Vatican could be a venue for Russia-Ukraine peace talks. "I wouldn't call it a broker, but it certainly is a place that I would think that both sides would be comfortable coming," he said before a meeting with the Vatican's point man on Ukraine, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi.
After Ukraine's delegation in Istanbul pressed Russia on the need for a meeting between Zelenskyy and Putin, Peskov said such a meeting could only happen "upon achieving certain results in the form of an agreement between the two sides."
French President Emmanuel Macron voiced confidence that Trump would react appropriately to Russia's actions and its resistance to a cease-fire, and suggested the reputation of the United States was at stake.
"Faced with the cynicism of President Putin I am sure that President Trump, mindful of the credibility of the United States of America, will react," Macron said during a visit to Albania.
Trump "was elected by the American people. He arrived with a laudable ambition: to make peace.... The cease-fire proposals, which I remind you are an American initiative, have not been respected by President Putin and his armies," he said.
Talks Fail To Bridge Divide
At the Istanbul talks, negotiators agreed to exchange 1,000 prisoners on each side in the near future, but there was no indication that the wide gaps between Russia and Ukraine on issues such as territory and a cease-fire were narrowed. European leaders joined Zelenskyy in condemning Moscow.
"The Russian position is clearly unacceptable, and not for the first time," British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said in a joint statement with the leaders of Poland, Germany, and France at a summit in Tirana, Albania.
He said that after a meeting with Zelenskyy, who was also at the summit, and a joint phone call with Trump in which they discussed the Istanbul talks, "we are now closely aligning and coordinating our responses and will continue to do so."
"Ukraine is ready to take the fastest possible steps to bring real peace, and it is important that the world holds a strong stance," Zelenskyy said on social media after the call with Trump.
"Our position [is that] if the Russians reject a full and unconditional cease-fire and an end to killings, tough sanctions must follow," he said. "Pressure on Russia must be maintained until Russia is ready to end the war."
Russia's Goals Remain Unchanged
Expectations for a breakthrough had been low at the first direct peace talks since unsuccessful negotiations held in the first two months of the 2022 invasion. Putin spurned Zelenskyy's invitation to hold their first face-to-face meeting since 2019.
The talks capped a frenzied week of diplomacy fueled by Trump's push to broker an end to the war, which has killed tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides and a growing number of Ukrainian civilians.
Putin launched the full-scale invasion eight years after Russia seized Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and fomented war in the eastern Donbas region in 2014. Russia now holds about one-fifth of Ukraine's territory but has fallen far short of Putin's goal of subjugating the country, independent since the Soviet collapse in 1991.
The only previous direct peace talks broke up in the spring of 2022 as the sides wrangled over major points of contention and amid revelations of atrocities committed by Russian forces in Bucha, a city they abandoned as they withdrew from northern Ukraine after failing to capture Kyiv.
In those negotiations, Russia was seeking a deal that analysts said would have amounted to Kyiv's surrender, leaving Ukraine a permanently neutral country with a small and toothless military, limited sovereignty, and little or no access to Western security support.
Accounts from the May 16 talks indicate that Moscow's conditions have changed little in three years, despite major battlefield setbacks later in 2022 and the slow, costly pace of Russian advances since then. But Russia has expanded its territorial demands, seeking control of four mainland regions it baselessly claims as its own.
According to a Ukrainian official who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, the Russian delegation said there could be no cease-fire until Ukraine withdraws its troops from the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson regions, which are now only partially Russian-occupied.
Russia also wants international recognition that those four regions and Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Russia seized in 2014, belong to Russia, the report said.
Other demands included permanent neutrality for Ukraine, with no weapons of mass destruction and no Western troops stationed on its soil, as well as the renunciation of claims for compensation for the massive damage inflicted on Ukraine by the Russian invasion.
Some experts say a cease-fire that would leave the current front line in place would be a blow to Putin's reputation at home but that the Kremlin could be forced to accept it if the West ratchets up economic pressure on Russia, including significantly widening sanctions on its oil shipping fleet.
In Russia's public comments or in the accounts that emerged from the Istanbul talks, there has been no indication that it would consider such a climbdown.
With Russia rejecting the cease-fire calls, the European Union is preparing a new package of sanctions against Moscow, including measures focusing on Russia's financial sector and its lucrative energy exports.
"We will increase the pressure," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in Tirana on May 16.
