"So...what are you wearing?" Trump has a 2 hour phone call with his supervisor at the Kremlin, gets played again

[Miles Archer]

Trump says Russia will ‘immediately’ work toward a ceasefire with Ukraine after phone call. But Putin seems unmoved

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/19/politics/trump-putin-call-ukraine-russia

For President Donald Trump, Monday’s phone call with Russian leader Vladimir Putin amounted to a major occasion — meant to ascertain his counterpart’s willingness to bring the conflict in Ukraine to an end.

For Putin, it seemed to be a much less momentous event. Unlike Trump, who conducted the two-hour conversation from the Oval Office and previewed the call ahead of time in all capital letters on social media, Putin did not clear his schedule. He phoned in from a school for gifted children in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, squeezing in Trump amid a tour of the facilities.

Afterward, it was evident each man viewed the call with differing levels of consequence. While Trump proclaimed in an optimistic social media post that the call “went very well” and that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to “immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire,” Putin made clear in his own comments he wasn’t budging from his maximalist demands to end the violence.

Without any major progress toward an immediate ceasefire, Trump sought to emphasize what he described as an excellent “tone and spirit” shared with the Kremlin leader. Putin, meanwhile, described the call as “meaningful and frank.”