It may be taking him longer than the 24 hours he pledged on the campaign trail, but it appears that US President Donald Trump might be getting somewhere on halting the war between Russia and Ukraine: following a call lasting an hour and a half, he has persuaded Vladimir Putin to agree to a partial ceasefire in the conflict.
According to the statements beginning to emerge from the Kremlin and White House, the call appears to have gone well. This is despite Putin seemingly delaying the call by at leat 50 minutes, after speaking at a conference for business lobbyists in Moscow earlier in the afternoon. A classic power play the Russian president often likes to pull out to impress his might and status on those he’s meeting with, it was certainly a curious decision on his part to keep the President of the United States – an unpredictable, thin-skinned man with the power, in theory, to make Putin’s life very difficult indeed – waiting.
This agreement does nothing to stop Moscow targeting civilian infrastructure in Ukraine
Curiously, the news of Putin’s agreement was broken first by Moscow and not Washington.
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