The Trump-Putin phone call gave the Kremlin leader a chance to pivot away from the war in Ukraine

They talked about the fighting in Ukraine, of course. But the U.S. and Russian presidents also chatted about improving relations between Washington and Moscow, peace in the Middle East, global security and even hockey games.

During the more than two-hour chat — the longest such call between the countries’ leaders in years --- Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin covered a range of topics. And importantly for Putin, the conversation gave him a chance to pivot away from the war in Ukraine and engage more broadly on global issues, drawing a line under Washington’s past efforts to cast him as an international pariah.

Tuesday's phone call appeared to reflect both leaders’ interest in mending the U.S.-Russian ties that have plummeted to their lowest point since the Cold War amid the 3-year-old conflict in Ukraine. The Kremlin and the state-controlled Russian media praised it as a long-sought launch of an equal dialogue between the two nuclear superpowers.

While both the White House and the Kremlin cast the discussion as a key step toward peace in Ukraine, Putin’s uncompromising demands are making a truce elusive.

Seeking to cultivate warm ties with Washington, Putin accepted a halt on strikes on energy infrastructure while avoiding an outright rejection of Trump's 30-day ceasefire. The Kremlin leader linked it to a halt in Western arms supplies and a freeze on Kyiv’s mobilization effort -– conditions that Ukraine and its allies firmly reject.

Unlike Kyiv, which accepted Trump’s ceasefire offer amid a series of battlefield setbacks, Putin appears to have little interest in a quick cessation of hostilities, with Russian forces firmly holding the initiative on the battlefield.

Ukraine is on the verge of completely losing its foothold in Russia’s Kursk region, where its forces are clinging to a sliver of land along the border after their surprise incursion in August 2024. Russia's offensive shattered Kyiv’s hopes of exchanging its gains in Kursk for some of the territory Moscow captured elsewhere in Ukraine.

Putin said Ukrainian forces that remain in Kursk are surrounded — a claim echoed by Trump — even though Kyiv denied its soldiers are encircled.

Ukrainian officials fear that Russia could try to attack the nearby Sumy region that borders Kursk. At the same time, the Russian army is pressing offensives in several sectors of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.

By making the ceasefire conditional on a freeze of arms supplies to Ukraine and its mobilization effort, Putin is trying to cement Russian gains and force Kyiv to cave in to Moscow’s demands. He wants Ukraine to withdraw its forces from the four regions that Russia illegally annexed but never fully captured, renounce its bid to join NATO, and radically trim its military.

Putin's acceptance of a halt on strikes on Ukraine’s energy facilities has allowed Trump to claim at least partial success for his peacemaking effort, but the move wasn't a major concession by Moscow, given the massive damage to Ukraine's power grid from years of attacks.

While seeking to expand his military gains in Ukraine to dictate peace terms, Putin also used the call to shift the discussion away from a ceasefire to other global issues. He appeared to win Trump’s interest.

The White House said in its readout of the call that the leaders “spoke broadly about the Middle East as a region of potential cooperation to prevent future conflicts,” discussed the need to stop proliferation of strategic weapons and “agreed that a future with an improved bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia has huge upside.”

“This includes enormous economic deals and geopolitical stability when peace has been achieved,” it said.

U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, who flew to Moscow last week to meet with Putin, praised both leaders and offered optimism the Kremlin was moving toward a broader truce.

“I would commend President Putin for all he did today on that call to move his country close to a final peace deal,” Witkoff told the Fox News Channel. “And I would give all the credit to President Trump. ... I can’t overstate how compelling he was on this call.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov underlined that Putin and Trump “understand each other well, trust each other and intend to move gradually toward normalization of Russian-U.S. relations.”

Russian state TV and other Kremlin-controlled media hailed the call as a move toward broad cooperation between Moscow and Washington.

The pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda noted that “normalization of relations between two nuclear superpowers” was on the agenda, and state news agency RIA Novosti pointed at the “evolving partner relations between the U.S. and Russia.”

“This format is in line with a new vision of a multipolar world that is apparently shared by both the White House and the Kremlin,” it said.

Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Endowment said “the most significant outcome was the implicit acceptance of U.S.-Russian cooperation on key international and bilateral issues.”

She added that “this marks an obvious victory for Putin, who seeks to decouple bilateral relations from the Ukraine war.”

“The ongoing ‘detoxification’ of Russia continues,” Stanovaya said in a commentary, even noting an agreement on Putin's proposal to organize hockey matches between Russian and American players.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy responded to the Putin-Trump call by warning that "trying to negotiate without Ukraine, in my view, will not be productive.”

Trump called Zelenskyy for about an hour Wednesday and said in a social media post the conversation was to “align both Russia and Ukraine in terms of their requests and needs.”

The creation of U.S. and Russian working groups to ponder ceasefire specifics and a possible deal on ensuring safe shipping in the Black Sea that was mentioned in the Kremlin readout of the Trump-Putin call marked yet another move toward discussing the fate of Ukraine in its absence, upending the Biden administration’s policy “of nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”

“The conversation didn’t bring good news to either Kyiv or Europe, who saw themselves clearly ignored,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, a Moscow-based political analyst familiar with Kremlin thinking. “Two great powers are discussing the settlement while paying little attention to others.”

Stanovaya noted Putin has shifted discussion away from the ceasefire while giving little in return.

“This is very bad news for Ukraine, which is increasingly being treated as a bargaining chip in this game,” she said.

Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, deplored Trump’s “affinity or sympathy” toward Putin and his reluctance to significantly punish or constrain Russia, which allows the Kremlin leader to stick to his strategy to “grind down Ukraine militarily and outlast the West politically.”

“Russia wants to decide the fate of Ukraine and ultimately of Europe, with the United States alone, with no other negotiating partner,” he said.

“I can’t think of another period in my lifetime when diplomacy has been so upended in such a brief space of time,” he said, noting the closest example was in the 1980s when Mikhail Gorbachev was the leader of the Soviet Union.

While "it took Gorbachev four years to abandon longstanding Soviet commitments in Eastern Europe," Gould-Davies said, "it has taken four weeks for the United States to call into question fundamental, longstanding commitments to Europe.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks, during a joint press conference with Finland's President Alexander Stubb, at the Presidential Palace, in Helsinki, Finland, Wednesday, March 19, 2025. (Heikki Saukkomaa/Lehtikuva via AP)

Steve Witkoff, left, White House special envoy, walks toward the Oval Office at the White House, Wednesday, March 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

In this photo taken from video distributed by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Thursday, March 13, 2025, a Russian soldier patrols an area in Sudzha in the Kursk region of Russia, after it was taken over by Russian troops. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)

In this photo taken from video distributed by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Thursday, March 13, 2025, Russian soldiers patrol an area in Sudzha, in the Kursk region of Russia, after it was taken over by Russian troops. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)

In this photo distributed by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Monday, March 17, 2025, a Russian soldier prepares to raise a flag atop a house in Staraya Sorochina, a village in the Sudzha district of the Kursk region of Russia after it was taken over by Russian troops. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)

In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Emergency Service on Wednesday, March 19, 2025, fire and smoke engulf a building after a Russian attack in Krasnopillia, in the Sumy region of Ukraine. (Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP)

People cross a street with a news ticker in the background reporting on a phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump, on the facade of the TASS news agency building in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, March 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Pavel Bednyakov)

President Donald Trump waves from the stairs of Air Force One upon his arrival at Joint Base Andrews, Md., Monday, March 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis M. Alvarez)

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting of the Prosecutor General's Office Board in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, March 19, 2025. (Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — As rescuers dug through the remains of a collapsed apartment building in Gaza’s Khan Younis on Thursday, they could hear the cries of a baby from underneath the rubble.

Suddenly, calls of “God is great” rang out. A man sprinted away from the wreckage carrying a living infant swaddled in a blanket and handed her to a waiting ambulance crew. The baby girl stirred fitfully as paramedics checked her over.

Her parents and brother were dead in the overnight Israeli airstrike.

“When we asked people, they said she is a month old and she has been under the rubble, since dawn,” said Hazen Attar, a civil defense first responder. “She had been screaming and then falling silent from time to time until we were able to get her out a short while ago, and thank God she is safe.”

The girl was identified as Ella Osama Abu Dagga. She had been born 25 days earlier, in the midst of a tenuous ceasefire that many Palestinians in Gaza had hoped would mark the end of a war that has devastated the enclave, killed tens of thousands and displaced nearly its entire population.

Only the girl's grandparents survived the attack. Killed were her brother, mother and father, along with another family that included a father and his seven children. Rescuers digging through the rubble could be seen pulling out the small body of a child sprawled on the mattress where he had been sleeping.

The girl's grandmother, Fatima Abu Dagga, sat with a group of other women in a relative's house Thursday, taking turns cradling the infant. Her sons and their wives and eight grandchildren died in the bombing, and only the baby survived. She wept over the loss, and the return to the devastation of war.

“We weren’t really living in a truce," she said. "We knew that at any moment the war might return. We never felt that there was stability, not at all.”

Israel resumed heavy strikes across Gaza on Tuesday, shattering the truce that had facilitated the release of more than two dozen hostages. Israel blamed the renewed fighting on Hamas because the militant group rejected a new proposal for the second phase of the ceasefire that departed from their signed agreement, which was mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt.

Nearly 600 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including more than 400 on Tuesday alone, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Health officials said most of the victims were women and children.

The strike that destroyed the infant girl’s home hit Abasan al-Kabira, a village just outside of Khan Younis near the border with Israel, killing at least 16 people, mostly women and children, according to the nearby European Hospital, which received the dead.

It was inside an area the Israeli military ordered evacuated earlier this week, encompassing most of eastern Gaza.

Nabil Abu Dagga, a relative of Ella's family who lives nearby, rushed to the scene of the strike.

“People were sitting together and enjoying themselves on a Ramadan night, staying up together as a family,” he said. “... No one was expecting it and no one would imagine that a human could kill another human in this way.”

He and others started pulling out bodies. Then they heard the baby girl's cries.

The Israel military says it only targets militants and blames civilian deaths on Hamas because it is deeply embedded in residential areas. The military did not immediately comment on the overnight strikes.

Hours later, the Israeli military restored a blockade on northern Gaza, including Gaza City, that it had maintained for most of the war, but which had been lifted under the ceasefire deal.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had returned to what remains of their homes in the north after a ceasefire took hold in January.

The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage.

Israel’s blistering retaliatory air and ground offensive has killed nearly 49,000 Palestinians since then, more than half of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. It does not say how many were militants. Israel says it has killed around 20,000 militants, without providing evidence.

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Associated Press staff writer Abby Sewell in Beirut contributed to this report.

Ella Osama Abu Dagga, 25 days old, is held by her great-aunt Suad Abu Dagga after she was pulled from the rubble earlier following an Israeli army airstrike that killed her parents and brother in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana )

Ella Osama Abu Dagga, 25 days old, is held by her great-aunt Suad Abu Dagga after she was pulled from the rubble earlier following an Israeli army airstrike that killed her parents and brother in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana )

Ella Osama Abu Dagga, 25 days old, is held by her great-aunt Suad Abu Dagga after she was pulled from the rubble earlier following an Israeli army airstrike that killed her parents and brother in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana )

Volunteers and rescue workers use a bulldozer as to remove the rubble of a building hit by an Israeli army airstrike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Mariam Dagga)

A volunteer attempts to pull the body of a man from the rubble following an Israeli army airstrike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Mariam Dagga)

EDS NOTE GRAPHIC CONTENT.- Rescue workers and volunteers attempt to pull the body of a man from the rubble following an Israeli army airstrike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Mariam Dagga)

EDS NOTE GRAPHIC CONTENT.- Rescue workers and volunteers attempt to pull the body of a man from the rubble following an Israeli army airstrike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Mariam Dagga)

Ella Osama Abu Dagga, 25 days old, lies in a van after being pulled from the rubble following an Israeli army airstrike that killed her parents and brother in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Mariam Dagga)