Kremlin Denies Trump-Putin Call on Ukraine as Biden Urges President-Elect Not to Abandon Kyiv

On Monday morning, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov flatly rejected a story that had been circulating since the weekend: that Donald Trump had phoned Vladimir Putin the day after the US election. "This is completely untrue," he said. "This is pure fiction, it's just false information. There was no conversation." Asked whether Putin planned any contact with the president-elect, he said there were no concrete plans yet.

The reports came from The Washington Post and Reuters, both citing sources familiar with the call, which they placed on Thursday. According to those accounts, Trump urged Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of the sizeable American military presence in Europe. Several other sources said the two men also talked about the goal of peace on the continent and the possibility of a further call soon to work on resolving the conflict. Trump's communications director, Steven Cheung, would not confirm or deny it, saying: "We do not comment on private calls between President Trump and other world leaders."

The Washington Post added a second claim: that two sources said the Ukrainian government had been told of the call and did not object. Kyiv rejected that. Ukraine's foreign ministry called it "impossible" that Ukraine would have endorsed such a call and said reports saying otherwise were false.

The Kremlin's position on Friday had been that Putin was ready to discuss Ukraine with Trump, but that this did not mean Moscow would soften its demands. Those are that Ukraine give up its ambitions to join NATO and surrender the four territories Russia currently holds.

Sky's Moscow correspondent, Ivor Bennett, noted that the Kremlin's denials have not always held. Last week it said Putin had no plans to congratulate Trump, and then he did, praising the president-elect's bravery during the attempt on his life. Bennett wrote that if the call did happen, Trump urging restraint is not the pro-Russia message Kyiv had feared. But any contact between the two men is likely to deepen anxiety in Kyiv and other European capitals, since they got on well during Trump's first term, in the view of many Western officials too well. Bennett's bottom line is that nobody, in Moscow, Kyiv or London, knows what Trump's Ukraine policy will be. He has vowed to end the war swiftly, but has not said how or what peace would look like. Meanwhile both sides are courting him: Kyiv and its allies, including the UK, hope to keep him from abandoning their cause, while Moscow appeals to his image as a dealmaker and argues for a settlement on its terms.

In Washington, President Joe Biden will hand over power on 20 January. He meets Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday, a week after Trump beat Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. National security adviser Jake Sullivan told CBS News that Biden will use the next 70 days to make the case to Congress and the incoming administration that the US should not walk away from Ukraine, because doing so would mean more instability in Europe.

The stakes are concrete. Under Biden, the US has provided tens of billions of dollars in military and economic aid to Ukraine, spending that Trump and some of his supporters have repeatedly criticised. Trump claimed last year that Putin would never have invaded had he been in the White House, and has often said he could settle the war "in one day."

On Sunday night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who met Trump in September, said after two and a half years of war that "diplomacy has no prospects without strength," but that without clear diplomatic goals weapons alone will not do the job.

The fighting continued meanwhile. Overnight on Saturday, both countries launched what were described as record drone attacks. Ukraine said Russia sent 145 drones, 62 of which were shot down. Russia's defence ministry said it downed 70 drones over its territory, 34 of them on the outskirts of Moscow. A woman was injured, and air traffic was briefly halted at some of Russia's busiest airports. Wednesday's Oval Office meeting is the next point at which more may become clear.