Trump vaguely reveals he spoke to Putin on ending war; Kyiv's military shoots down 70 Russian drones

Ukraine’s military said on Sunday that it shot down 70 drones out of the 151 that Russia launched to attack the country overnight.

The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania completed a switch from Russia’s electricity grid to the EU’s system on Sunday, severing Soviet-era ties amid heightened security after the suspected sabotage of several subsea cables and pipelines.

Trump says he has spoken to Putin about ending Ukraine war

US President Donald Trump said he had spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone about ending the war in Ukraine, the New York Post reported, the first officially acknowledged conversation between Putin and a US president since early 2022.

Trump, who has promised to end the war but not yet set out in public how he would do so, said last week that the US was talking to both the Russians and Ukrainians about resolving the conflict, but he gave no additional details.

In an interview from Air Force One on Friday, Trump told the New York Post that he had “better not say” how many times he and Putin had spoken. He also did not disclose when the latest conversation had taken place.

“He [Putin] wants to see people stop dying,” said Trump.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the Tass state news agency that “many different communications are emerging”.

“I personally may not know something, be unaware of something,” said Peskov when asked by Tass to comment. “Therefore, in this case, I can neither confirm nor deny it.”

Asked during an NBC News interview on Sunday when the conversation or conversations between Trump and Putin took place, US National Security Adviser Mike Waltz also declined to say.

“I’m not going to get ahead of the president and there certainly are a lot of sensitive conversations going on,” said Waltz.

Trump has repeatedly said he wants to end the war and that he will meet with Putin to discuss it, though the date or venue for a summit is still not publicly known. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are seen by Russia as possible venues for a summit, Reuters reported earlier this month.

In the coming days, a flurry of US officials are heading to Europe in part to discuss the war, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Vice-President JD Vance and Keith Kellogg, the special envoy for the Ukraine war.

In the NBC interview, Waltz indicated that Trump would be willing to use sanctions and tariffs to coax Putin to the negotiating table.

Waltz said US and Ukrainian officials would discuss the US gaining access to Ukraine’s rare earth resources as compensation for US aid to the eastern European ally.

“Those conversations are going to happen this week,” he said.

On 14 June, Putin set out his opening terms for an immediate end to the war: Ukraine must drop its Nato ambitions and withdraw its troops from the entirety of the territory of four Ukrainian regions claimed and mostly controlled by Russia.

On Friday, Trump said he would probably meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky next week to discuss ending the war.

Ukraine shoots down 70 out of 151 drones launched by Russia

Ukraine’s military said on Sunday that it shot down 70 drones out of the 151 that Russia launched to attack the country overnight.

Ukraine’s air force said that 74 drones did not reach their targets, probably due to electronic warfare, and two were still in the air.

Zelensky said that last week, Russia had launched 1,260 aerial bombs, almost 750 drones, and more than 10 missiles of various types against Ukraine.

Baltic states switch to European power grid, ending Russia ties

The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania completed a switch from Russia’s electricity grid to the EU’s system on Sunday, severing Soviet-era ties amid heightened security after the suspected sabotage of several subsea cables and pipelines.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hailed the move, years in the planning, as marking a new era of freedom for the region, in a speech at a ceremony in Vilnius alongside the leaders of the three countries and the Polish president.

“These chains of power lines linking you to hostile neighbours will be a thing of the past,” said Von der Leyen.

Debated for many years, the complex switch away from the grid of their former Soviet imperial overlord gained momentum following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

It is designed to integrate the three Baltic nations more closely with the European Union and to boost the region’s energy security.

“This is freedom, freedom from threats, freedom from blackmail,” said Von der Leyen, adding that the wider European continent was also liberating itself from the use of Russian natural gas.

After disconnecting on Saturday from the IPS/UPS network, established by the Soviet Union in the 1950s and now run by Russia, the Baltic nations cut cross-border high-voltage transmission lines in eastern Latvia, some 100m from the Russian border, handing out pieces of chopped wire to enthusiastic bystanders as keepsakes.

The Baltic Sea region is on high alert following power cable, telecom and gas pipeline outages between the Baltics and Sweden or Finland. All were believed to have been caused by ships dragging anchors along the seabed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Russia has denied any involvement.

Poland and the Baltics deployed navy assets, elite police units and helicopters to monitor the area after an undersea power link from Finland to Estonia was damaged in December, while Lithuania’s military began drills to protect the overland connection to Poland.

Analysts say any further damage to links could push power prices in the Baltics to levels not seen since the invasion of Ukraine, when energy prices soared.

The IPS/UPS grid was the final remaining link to Russia for the three countries, which re-emerged as independent nations in the early 1990s at the fall of the Soviet Union and joined the European Union and Nato in 2004.

Russia ‘sees no positive steps from US on disarmament’

Russia was yet to see any positive steps from the new US administration on disarmament, said Russia’s permanent representative to the United Nations in Geneva in an interview published on Sunday.

“We are ready to maintain smooth relations of cooperation with any American administration,” said Gennady Gatilov, according to RIA Novosti.

“We would be ready to do this within the framework of the Conference on Disarmament,” he was quoted as saying. “So far, we do not see any positive progress in this regard in Geneva.”

The conference, an international disarmament forum that meets in the Swiss city, has negotiated a number of major multilateral arms limitation and disarmament agreements, including on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.

“We are, of course, closely monitoring the rhetoric and first steps of the representatives of the new US administration,” said Gatilov. “We expect that the Americans will move from words to action, especially since they have said a lot since January 20.”

Ukraine keeps gas imports at a high level

Ukraine kept gas imports at a high level of 16.3 million cubic metres (mcm) on Sunday, data provided by the operator of the state-run gas transmission system showed.

The data suggested Ukraine would import 7.1mcm of gas from Hungary, 7.3mcm from Slovakia and 1.8mcm from Poland.

Ukraine began sharply increasing its gas imports last week after a series of Russian missile attacks in recent months targeted Ukrainian gas sector facilities.

In January Russia launched scores of missiles and drones at Ukraine’s western Lviv region where gas storage facilities are located and in the Kharkiv region, the main Ukrainian gas production area.

Ukraine can keep around 30 billion cubic metres of gas in storage, but the country has stopped reporting the volume of gas in facilities, which have been the target of regular Russian missile attacks since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February, 2022.

Both the drop in gas production and difficulties with fuel extraction from underground storage facilities may force Kyiv to increase the volume of imports.

Ukrainian energy minister German Galushchenko told Interfax Ukraine news agency last week that the country could need to import around one billion cubic metres of gas during the current heating season.

The former head of the transit operator, Serhiy Makogon, said last month that current Ukrainian daily gas consumption was about 110mcm and was covered by 52mcm of production and 58mcm from storage. DM