Trump says Putin has agreed to negotiate Ukraine ceasefire

US President Donald Trump has said that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin have agreed to begin negotiations to broker a ceasefire in Ukraine.

Secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, said that Ukraine would have to cede territory and reject Nato membership in order to reach a deal.

The rapid entry into negotiations with Russia and open demands that Ukraine concede land have set alarm bells ringing in Kyiv and among its European allies that the Trump administration will offer minimal resistance to Putin’s demands in order to cut a deal as quickly as possible.

In a social media post, Trump said that held a “lengthy and highly productive phone call” with Putin and that they agreed to “have our respective teams start negotiations immediately”.

He also said that he and Putin had agreed to visit each other’s countries.

“As we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial. “President Putin even used my very strong Campaign motto of, ‘COMMON SENSE.’ We both believe very strongly in it. We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s Nations.”

The Kremlin confirmed the call and the mutual invitations for the leaders to visit each other’s countries, in what would be the first visits by an American president to Russia since 2009 and the first by Putin to the US since 2015.

In its readout, the Kremlin also maintained a maximalist position, with Putin saying he “mentioned the need to eliminate the root causes of the conflict and agreed with Trump that a long-term settlement could be achieved through peaceful negotiations”.

Zelenskyy – at least in public – offered support for the talks on Wednesday, saying he and Trump had held a “meaningful” conversation by phone. “No one wants peace more than Ukraine,” he wrote. “Together with the US, we are charting our next steps to stop Russian aggression and ensure a lasting, reliable peace. As President Trump said, let’s get it done.”

Trump said the call went “very well” and said that Zelenskyy would meet on Friday with the vice-president, JD Vance, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on the side-lines of the Munich Security Conference.

The US negotiating position was outlined in Brussels, where Hegseth delivered public remarks that Kyiv must recognise that it cannot win back all the land occupied by Russia.

“We must start by recognising that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” Hegseth said, sketching out an initial position for any peace negotiations with Russia.

“Chasing this illusory goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering,” he added, though this could be interpreted as in effect acknowledging the annexation of Crimea, and large parts of the Donbas by Russia.

Kyiv would only achieve peace through “robust security guarantees”, but Hegseth ruled out Nato membership for Ukraine. Instead, peace would have to be secured by “capable European and non-European troops”, who he stressed would not come from the US.

Any British or European troops deployed in Ukraine would not be covered by part of a Nato mission or covered by the alliance’s article 5 guarantee, Hegseth added, meaning they would in effect be reliant on help from participating states.