Trump plans call with Putin after Russian drone hits bus in Ukraine
The strike came hours after the Russian and Ukrainian delegations left Istanbul after agreeing to a large exchange of prisoners of war.
US President Donald Trump has said he plans to speak by phone on Monday with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, followed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and various Nato allies, about ending the war in Ukraine.
Mr Trump said that the call with Mr Putin will be about stopping what he called the “bloodbath” in Ukraine.
“Hopefully it will be a productive day, a ceasefire will take place, and this very violent war, a war that should have never happened, will end,” Mr Trump wrote in a post on his social networking site, Truth Social.
His remarks came less than a day after the first direct talks between Moscow and Kyiv in years failed to yield a ceasefire.
Mr Putin had spurned Mr Zelensky’s offer to meet face-to-face in Turkey after he himself proposed negotiations in Istanbul – although not at the presidential level – as an alternative to the “full and unconditional” ceasefire urged by Ukraine and its Western allies, including the US.
Earlier on Saturday, top diplomats from Russia and the US held the latest in a series of phone calls, shortly after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the Vatican could be a venue for Russia-Ukraine peace talks.
In Ukraine, a north-eastern town declared a period of mourning after a Russian drone hit a bus evacuating civilians from front-line areas, killing nine people, Ukrainian officials said.
The strike came hours after the Russian and Ukrainian delegations left Istanbul after agreeing to a large exchange of prisoners of war (PoWs).
Seven people were also injured in the attack in Bilopillia, a town around six miles from Russia’s border, three of them seriously, according to local governor Oleh Hryhorov and Ukraine’s national police.
Mr Zelensky described the attack as “deliberate killing of civilians”, adding in a post on the Telegram messaging app that “Russians could scarcely not realise what kind of vehicle they were hitting”.
The local media outlet Suspilne said the passengers on the bus were being evacuated from the town when the strike happened. Authorities are working to identify some of the victims, most of them elderly women.
Mr Zelensky lamented the missed opportunity from Friday’s peace talks, saying that “Ukraine has long proposed this — a full and unconditional ceasefire in order to save lives.”
“Russia only retains the ability to continue killing,” Mr Zelensky added.
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said he was “appalled” by the attack. “If Putin is serious about peace, Russia must agree to a full and immediate ceasefire, as Ukraine has done,” he wrote on X.
Russia’s Defence Ministry claimed its forces hit a military staging area in the Sumy region on Saturday morning, some 50 31 miles south east of Bilopillia, without mentioning any other attacks there.
According to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War think tank, Ukrainian forces have been inching forward into Russian territory in the Kursk region, just north of Bilopillia.
Russia said last month that its forces had fully reclaimed the Kursk region, nearly nine months after Kyiv’s lightning incursion captured more than 100 settlements there and promised to hand Ukraine a bargaining chip in possible negotiations. Ukrainian officials claimed fighting in Kursk was still ongoing.
Russian shelling, drones and airs trikes killed at least five other civilians on Friday and overnight across Ukraine’s Donetsk, Kharkiv and Kherson regions, according to local officials there.
Russian forces overnight also launched 62 drones, Ukraine’s air force reported. It said 36 of the drones were shot down and six more veered off course.
The talks in Istanbul on Friday ended after less than two hours without a ceasefire, although both sides agreed on exchange of 1,000 PoWs each, according to the heads of both delegations, in what would be their biggest such swap.
Ukraine’s intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, said on Ukrainian TV on Saturday the exchange could happen as early as next week.
But the Kremlin has pushed back against a proposal by Ukraine and its Western allies for a temporary ceasefire as a first step toward a peaceful settlement.
Mr Zelensky said he had discussed the outcome of the talks with Mr Trump and the leaders of France, Germany, Britain and Poland. In a post on X from a European leadership meeting in Albania on Friday, he urged “tough sanctions” against Moscow if it rejects “a full and unconditional ceasefire and an end to killings”.
