President Trump said on Thursday that the Kremlin had agreed to a temporary pause in its missile attacks on Kyiv amid the fierce cold in the Ukrainian capital, a shift that, if true, would represent the latest sign that Ukraine-Russia peace talks are gaining momentum.
There was no official confirmation of a partial cease-fire from either Russia or Ukraine, but there were signals out of both countries that some sort of pause might be going into effect. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, speaking a few hours after Mr. Trump, thanked the United States for its efforts to halt Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure but stopped short of declaring that there would be a reprieve.
“We hope the United States can make this happen,” Mr. Zelensky said. “The situation tonight and over these days — the real situation at our energy facilities and in our cities — will show how things stand.”
An adviser to the Ukrainian president’s office said that Ukraine had asked for a pause in strikes in a meeting with Russian negotiators last weekend, and that the Russian side had agreed, but not in writing. In Russia, reports of an order to hold fire temporarily on Kyiv and Ukrainian energy targets surfaced early Thursday on the Telegram accounts of pro-war bloggers close to the Russian military.
Russia pounded cities across Ukraine with drone and missile strikes earlier this week, but there were no major airstrikes on Ukrainian cities on Thursday. Russia has left thousands of apartment buildings in Kyiv without heat during the extreme cold of recent weeks, in a campaign against Ukrainian energy infrastructure that has appeared aimed at breaking the country’s morale.
“I personally asked President Putin not to fire into Kyiv and the various towns for a week,” Mr. Trump said at a televised cabinet meeting at the White House on Thursday. “And he agreed to do that.”
It was not clear when or how Mr. Trump made that request, and neither the White House nor the Kremlin have disclosed a phone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin since December. But Ukrainian, Russian and American negotiators met in the United Arab Emirates last weekend in the first such trilateral talks since Russia’s invasion in 2022. The Ukrainians and Russians are expected to meet again in the coming days, possibly with a U.S. presence, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday.
“I think the people of Ukraine are now hopeful and expectant that we’re going to deliver a peace deal sometime soon,” Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s peace envoy who participated in last weekend’s talks, said at Thursday’s cabinet meeting.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Witkoff have spoken about progress toward ending Russia’s invasion repeatedly over the last year, only to see the fierce fighting continue. Both sides agreed to a 30-day cease-fire on energy infrastructure targets last spring, but the move failed to pave the way for a broader deal.
This time, however, Russian and Ukrainian officials are speaking directly with each other, in a departure from the Trump administration’s efforts at shuttle diplomacy last year. The partial cease-fire described by Mr. Trump could emerge as a key test of the new approach.
The adviser to the Ukrainian president’s office, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, referred to the pause as a “gentlemen’s agreement” among negotiators. The agreement did not stick immediately. After Russia launched drones and missiles at Odesa and at a passenger train on Tuesday, killing five people on the train, the Russian negotiators privately apologized, the Ukrainian adviser said, and explained that not all branches of the Russian military had been told to hold fire.
The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, declined to comment on the matter on Thursday, according to Russia’s Interfax news agency.
Samuel Charap, a Russia and Ukraine expert at RAND Corporation, a security research organization in Washington, said that the temporary halt could represent “a confidence-building measure” to “demonstrate seriousness of purpose in a negotiation.”
“It’s not an indication that the strikes will end for good,” Mr. Charap said.
Ukraine sent senior officials, including Mr. Zelensky’s chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, to last weekend’s talks in Abu Dhabi. Russia sent the powerful head of its military intelligence agency, Igor Kostyukov; Mr. Witkoff said that “five Russian generals” participated in total.
The stature of the interlocutors is one signal that the negotiations may be gaining traction, even as it remained far from clear whether the talks could succeed in ending the fighting. Negotiators have had to contend with a wide range of issues, including Mr. Putin’s determination to keep Ukraine from joining the NATO alliance and Mr. Zelensky’s desire for security guarantees from the West to help deter a future Russian invasion. On Wednesday, Mr. Rubio said during a Senate hearing that the “one remaining item” at issue in the talks was Russia’s demand for control of all of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, including the part now controlled by Kyiv.
“It’s still a bridge we haven’t crossed,” Mr. Rubio said. “It’s still a gap, but at least we’ve been able to narrow down the issue set to one central one, and it will probably be a very difficult one.”
Asked about that comment on Thursday, the Kremlin foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said in an interview with the Russian state Channel One that while the territory issue was the “main question,” others were still unresolved. He said that Russia had not given its assent to the security guarantees Western nations had pledged to offer Ukraine.
The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, raised questions about those guarantees in comments on Thursday, criticizing any arrangement that he said would allow the current government in Ukraine to continue threatening Russia.
“We don’t know what guarantees were agreed, but apparently, those are guarantees for the Ukrainian regime which has pursued the Russophobic, neo-Nazi policy course,” Mr. Lavrov said.
Mr. Zelensky had previously described the negotiation over security guarantees as “100 percent done,” and he said Kyiv was waiting to sign an agreement with its partners.
Mr. Rubio, during his testimony to the Senate, said the security arrangements agreed upon “involve the deployment of a handful of European troops, primarily French and the U.K., and then a U.S. backstop.”
“There’s a lot of talk about security guarantees, and it’s something that there’s general agreement about now with the case of Ukraine,” Mr. Rubio said.
Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.
Anton Troianovski writes about American foreign policy and national security for The Times from Washington. He was previously a foreign correspondent based in Moscow and Berlin.
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