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

Vladimir Putin has visited Kursk for the first time since claiming to have completely retaken the Russian region from Ukrainian forces, state media reported on Wednesday, as the Russian president attempts to repel international pressure to agree to a 30-day ceasefire on the other side of the border.

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.

After Trump’s third phone call with Putin since his inauguration, it appears there will be no letup in fighting and less U.S. pressure on Moscow.

The president promised peace on day one. Now he’s enabling Putin’s advances.

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.

Russia is preparing for a prisoner exchange with Ukraine in the 1,000 for 1,000 format. In particular, the Kremlin has already prepared and submitted a list of names, states Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov in a comment to Interfax.