WASHINGTON — President Trump said that Russian President Vladimir Putin “kept his word” on not attacking Ukraine for one week — despite the perception that Putin broke the deal with a bombing blitz after just four days.
“It was Sunday to Sunday, and it opened up. And he hit them hard last night,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday afternoon in the Oval Office.
“He kept his word on that. It was — it’s a lot, you know, one week. We’ll take anything, because it’s really, really cold over there, but it was on Sunday, and he went from Sunday to Sunday.”
Trump added: “I spoke to him. I want him to end the war.”
The temperature in Kyiv was 0 degrees Fahrenheit as Trump spoke — and forecasts show no days above freezing for the coming week.
Trump said last Thursday that he had asked Putin “not to fire on Kyiv and the cities and towns for a week” due to extreme cold.
He did not clarify when that reprieve would start.
Russia attacked power plants and other electrical infrastructure in Kyiv and other regions on Monday night into Tuesday. Ukraine’s foreign ministry said that the Russian military used 450 drones and more than 60 missiles to carry out the attack.
A different Russian attack on Sunday reportedly killed 12 coal miners in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region.
Although Trump described a Sunday-Sunday timeframe, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Monday that the pause in attacks had been expected to last through Tuesday.
He said the start date was Jan. 30, though it was not reported at the time it began.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier Tuesday that Trump was “unsurprised” by Russia’s attack.
“I spoke with the president about it this morning, and his reaction was, unfortunately, unsurprised,” Leavitt told reporters.
“These are two countries who have been engaged in a very brutal war for several years — a war that would have never started if the president were still in office.”
Leavitt noted that special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner “will be in Abu Dhabi tomorrow for another round of trilateral talks” between Russia and Ukraine.
Witkoff and Kushner previously brokered the October peace deal that ended large-scale fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
