LONDON — President Donald Trump again on Monday expressed frustration with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin as Russian strikes on Ukraine continued despite White House efforts to broker a peace deal between the warring neighbors.
“Every conversation I have with him is a good conversation,” the president told reporters of Putin during an Oval Office executive order signing event. “And then unfortunately, a bomb is loaded up into Kyiv or someplace, and then I get very angry about it.”
Trump has repeatedly admonished Putin for Russia’s nightly strikes on Ukrainian cities. Nonetheless, the president told reporters he was still hopeful of progress towards a peace deal.
“I think we’re going to get the war done,” Trump said, though added, “You never know what’s going to happen in a war. Strange things happen in war. The fact that [Putin] went to Alaska, our country, I think, was a big statement that he wants to get it done.”
Both Russia and Ukraine continued long-range strikes through the weekend and into Monday. On Tuesday, Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 59 drones into the country overnight, of which 47 were shot down or suppressed.
The air force reported impacts of 12 drones across nine locations.
Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said its forces downed at least 51 Ukrainian drones overnight into Tuesday morning, two which were en route to Moscow.
Following in-person meetings with Putin in Alaska and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — plus a host of European leaders — in Washington, D.C., earlier this month, Trump raised the hope of an imminent bilateral meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian presidents.
Zelenskyy has repeatedly expressed willingness to attend such a meeting. But Putin and his officials have consistently dodged the proposal.
“Maybe they will, maybe they won’t,” the president told ABC News Monday of the potential for the two men to meet. Trump said he had spoken to Putin since Zelenskyy’s visit to Washington, but declined to discuss the specifics of the call.
Asked if he would act if the bilateral meeting does not materialize, Trump refused to detail possible consequences but said he may act “over the next week or two.”
U.S. peace efforts continued on Monday, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaking with European counterparts and Trump’s Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg traveling to Kyiv to meet with Zelenskyy.
For both U.S. officials, the question of future security guarantees for Ukraine to prevent future Russian aggression was a key topic of discussion.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha took part in the call with Rubio. “I reiterated Ukraine’s position that security guarantees must be concrete, legally binding and effective,” he wrote on X after. “They should be multidimensional, including military, diplomatic, legal and other levels.”
Zelenskyy said his meeting with Kellogg was “productive,” again expressing his thanks to Trump’s efforts to broker a deal and his willingness to lend U.S. backing to security guarantees.
Kellogg, meanwhile, said the U.S. side is “working very, very hard” to get “to a position where, in the near term, we have, with a lack of a better term, security guarantees. That’s a work in progress.”
ABC News’ Shannon K. Kingston, Rachel Scott, Lalee Ibssa and Will Gretsky contributed to this report.
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