The White House disputes the account, saying the U.S. president believes Russia is winning in Ukraine but still wants peace.

Few details were known about Monday's call, aside from Trump's reported attempt to initiate peace talks aimed at ending the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the war in Ukraine and other matters by phone for two hours on Monday. The conversation yielded no breakthrough on efforts to end the largest ground war in Europe since World War II. A ceasefire seems as far as ever.

Kyiv will not meet Vladimir Putin's request for Ukraine to withdraw troops from its four partially occupied regions, Volodymyr Zelensky has said. The Ukrainian leader said "it's our land," in a briefing to reporters on Monday,

The author joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “The Piano Tuner's Wives,” which was published in The New Yorker in 1995. The eighty-seven-year-old French director, in town for a rerelease of “A Man and a Woman,” his swinging-sixties “make-out movie,” ponders what he believes will be his final film.

President Donald Trump's phone call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin did not achieve great strides on ending the war in Ukraine

Senate Majority Leader John Thune warned President Vladimir Putin on Thursday that if he does not "make a serious proposal for an immediate ceasefire" with Ukraine, the Senate will pass new sanctions against the Russian government.