Kyiv, Ukraine – Russia launched 145 drones and six missiles on Ukraine on Tuesday just minutes after US President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin finished their phone conversation.
The attacks were launched from six locations in western Russia, and 45 drones targeted the Kyiv region alone, Ukrainian officials said.
They said, however, that while the strikes damaged civilian infrastructure, they did not kill or wound anyone.
The attacks were a way of rejecting Trump’s 30-day ceasefire proposal, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“Today, Putin virtually threw away the proposal to fully cease the fire,” he said.
Ukrainian citizens were indignant.
“Putin shows that Trump is nothing but his lap dog,” said Larysa Kozhedub, a 52-year-old manicurist whose nephew Oleksiy was killed near the eastern city of Pokrovsk last October.
“America lost the Cold War, and Ukraine is paying for it,” she told Al Jazeera.
But analysts are more calm and cautious.
No “betrayal” of Ukraine’s interests resulted from the Trump-Putin conversation that lasted more than two hours, said Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta think tank in Kyiv.
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“Everyone here was very afraid that Putin will yet again zombify Trump,” he told Al Jazeera, referring to Trump’s susceptibility to Putin’s views on the Russia-Ukraine conundrum.
Instead, Fesenko noted, Trump did not bend to Russia’s calls to halt Washington’s military aid to Kyiv or force Ukraine to cease mobilisation in return for the full ceasefire.
During a draconian mobilisation campaign, Ukraine replenished its decimated front-line forces – and for the first time in more than two years managed to wrestle back several towns in eastern Ukraine.
However, Ukrainian troops were kicked out of Russia’s western Kursk region, where they had occupied up to 1,000 square kilometres (385 square miles) since August 2024.
After a panicked withdrawal and losses, they currently maintain their hold on several villages and farms near the Russian-Ukrainian border.
“However, it’s too early to relax. Russia will continue to present its ultimatums in the next stages of talks,” Fesenko said.
Ironically, Trump and Putin agreed to implement parts of Kyiv’s peace plan, which was presented at the March 11 talks between US and Ukrainian officials in Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah, Fesenko said.
Kyiv proposed to cease air and sea attacks, as well as strikes on energy infrastructure for 30 days.
Russia’s pummelling of Ukraine’s power stations has caused blackouts and further hobbled the country’s economy.
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In response, Kyiv doubled down on its drone and missile attacks on Russian oil refineries, fuel depots, military targets and civilian sites.
Kyiv is ready to suspend its strikes on the energy infrastructure, Zelenskyy said.
“Our side will support it,” Zelenskyy told a news conference held after the Trump-Putin talks.
The Trump-Putin conversation may herald the pace of upcoming peace talks and a step-by-step ceasefire that would take weeks if not months to implement, Fesenko said.
The next step – a suspension of air attacks – would be beneficial to Ukraine since Russia launches thousands of drones and dozens of ballistic and cruise missiles across the country every month.
The effect, however, would be more psychological than practical.
Millions of Ukrainians lie awake at night to the howling of air raid sirens and the boom of air defence systems shooting down the drones, while actual casualties and destruction remain minimal.
‘Global security’ talks amid Middle East tensions
The Kremlin said that apart from Ukraine, Trump and Putin discussed the situation in the Middle East, the Red Sea region and “interaction in the matters of nuclear non-proliferation and global security”.
This way, Putin offered Trump help with Iran’s nuclear programme and Yemen’s Houthis, Kyiv-based analyst Igar Tyshkevych said.
Washington started bombing the Houthis on Saturday even though they stopped attacks on ships in the Red Sea after the ceasefire began in Gaza.
“Yes, Putin wants to help Trump to kill two birds with one stone,” Tyshkevych told Al Jazeera.
However, Putin may be bluffing because Tehran uses its clout among Houthis to up the ante in its own dealings with Washington and does not necessarily want Putin as a middleman, he said.
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But if Russia could indeed help Trump with Iran and Yemen, Putin will ask for concessions in Ukraine, he said.
Trump is in a political pickle as he needs a fast peace settlement ahead of his talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Putin’s main international backer.
“It’s one thing when you come [to negotiations] with a ready algorithm that began to work, and another thing when you start working from scratch,” Tyshkevych said.
‘Ukraine’s biggest loss in the past year’
Meanwhile, Russia is “fragmenting” the Ukrainian problem by offering preconditions such as separate discussions of warfare in the Black Sea, Tyshkevych said.
In the past two years, Kyiv succeeded in destroying Russian warships in annexed Crimea.
The attacks forced Russia’s entire Black Sea fleet to relocate from its main base in Crimea’s Sevastopol to the Russian port of Novorossiysk.
Ukraine’s agreement to stop strikes in the Black Sea will manifest Zelenskyy’s “political and military defeat”, predicted Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s University of Bremen.
Kyiv already failed to use its dominance in the western part of the Black Sea to retake Ukrainian islands and spits west of annexed Crimea, and lost several islands in the Dnieper delta, he said.
“This is Ukraine’s biggest loss in the past year” besides the retreat from around the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk, Mitrokhin told Al Jazeera.
Meanwhile, Putin wants to use a pause in Trump’s push for the peace settlement to occupy more Ukrainian areas with the troops that pushed Ukrainians out of Kursk, said Mitrokhin.
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As a result, there could be more “meat marches”, or devastating frontal assaults on Ukrainian positions in Donetsk, he said.
But Ukraine’s attacks on border areas of Russia’s Belgorod region that lie north of Kursk earlier this week could neutralise that, Mitrokhin predicted.
