For much of 2025, any phone call between President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine put Kyiv on edge. Ukrainian officials feared their country could be traded away by an American president prone to indulging his Russian counterpart. After each call, they rushed to find out what had been said and, often, to contain the fallout.
A call on Wednesday between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin, the first this year, drew a markedly different response in Kyiv: not panic, but a shrug.
Reacting to the news on Thursday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in a social media post that he had instructed his team to clarify what had been discussed on the call, including a proposal to hold a brief cease-fire next month, before deciding his next move. He offered no hint that he would seek his own call with Mr. Trump or would consult European allies — once familiar rituals after Washington and Moscow held talks excluding Kyiv.
By Thursday morning, news of the call barely registered on Ukraine’s news sites.
Ukraine’s relative indifference to the Trump-Putin call has a simple explanation, Ukrainian officials and analysts said. After more than a year of similar conversations that failed to move the needle in peace talks, Ukrainians have stopped pinning their fears — or, in some cases, their hopes — on them.
“We don’t pay much attention to such calls anymore because they don’t produce any tangible results,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, the head of the Ukrainian Parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a member of Mr. Zelensky’s party.
Ukraine’s new posture doesn’t mean it can afford to cross the United States, a crucial military partner. Mr. Merezhko said Ukraine would “try to maintain constructive working relations with Trump.”
Although Mr. Zelensky restated his position on Thursday that Ukraine favored a sustained pause in hostilities, he is expected to agree to a proposal raised by Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin in Wednesday’s call for a brief cease-fire on May 9, coinciding with Russia’s World War II Victory Day.
But any agreement is likely to be driven less by faith that such a cease-fire can pave the way to lasting peace than by a desire to avoid angering Mr. Trump and to signal that Ukraine remains engaged in diplomacy. Ukrainian officials have long voiced skepticism about short-term truces, pointing to previous cease-fires that each side accused the other of violating.
Mr. Merezhko said the proposal to hold a cease-fire was not evidence of a genuine push for peace. Rather, he argued, it reflected concern in Russia that Ukraine could disrupt the traditional military parade held in Moscow on that day by attacking it with its growing arsenal of long-range weapons. Russia has already significantly scaled back its plans for the parade over fears of Ukrainian attacks.
Ukraine’s shift in tone is reflected in how people in the country view Mr. Trump’s role in ending the war.
In December 2024, shortly after Mr. Trump’s election victory, a majority of Ukrainians considered his return to power good news for Ukraine, placing their hopes in his promise to end the war quickly, according to a poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. A year later, roughly three-quarters of them viewed it as bad news, the poll found.
What happened in the meantime were 11 calls between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin that yielded little to no result and underscored Mr. Trump’s tendency to align with Moscow’s favored approach to ending the war.
After a call last May, Mr. Trump dropped his demand for an immediate cease-fire and instead backed Russia’s proposal for direct negotiations over a broad peace deal. That negotiation framework would have favored Russia by allowing talks to proceed while its forces continued advancing on the battlefield, putting pressure on Ukraine to make concessions.
Mr. Trump went further after a meeting with Mr. Putin in Alaska in August, backing Russia’s demand that Ukraine cede a large section of territory it still controls in the east in order to cease hostilities — a condition Kyiv has consistently described as unacceptable.
The result is a public mood in Ukraine that has reversed, from high expectations that Mr. Trump could deliver peace to increasingly deep-rooted conviction that he will not.
Nearly three-quarters of Ukrainians said last month that they did not believe the current U.S.-mediated negotiations would lead to lasting peace, according to another poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.
In Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, several passers-by openly shrugged on Thursday morning when asked about the Trump-Putin call the day before.
“I think it doesn’t mean anything,” said Alina Kryvenko, a 36-year-old editor. “Given the effectiveness of Trump’s calls, they all amount to zero.”
Polina Rovner, a 24-year-old physiotherapist, said that after so many similar calls, she had stopped “paying much attention.”
Instead, Ukrainians are increasingly turning their focus to what many believe will be an even longer war. The country is pouring enormous financial resources into its domestic defense industry, including over $100 billion in new European Union funding.
Ukraine’s booming armament production has gradually allowed it to fight the war on its own terms rather than relying on deliveries of U.S. weapons with the restrictions Washington has sometimes attached to their use, including not using them to strike inside Russia.
In recent months, Ukraine has used its vast arsenal of long-range attack drones to strike Russia’s revenue-generating oil industry.
Mr. Zelensky has said that some of Ukraine’s Western allies asked it to stop the strikes, worried they could further strain an oil market already squeezed by the war in Iran. Although Mr. Zelensky did not name the countries, Ukrainian officials have acknowledged in private that they include the United States.
Regardless, Ukraine has continued the strikes unabated.
On Thursday, just a few hours after the Trump-Putin call ended, Ukraine’s military struck oil facilities deep inside Russia, near the city of Perm, according to the country’s security services. NASA satellites detected multiple fires in the area.
Olha Konovalova contributed reporting.
