MOSCOW — Just hours after President Donald Trump said peace talks with Russia’s Vladimir Putin were on hold to avoid wasting his own time, the Kremlin launched intense strikes on Ukraine that killed more than a dozen people, including someone at a kindergarten.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the attacks were Russia’s "spit in the face" of peace and showed the need to provide his country with long-range missiles. The Kremlin said Wednesday that neither Putin nor Trump wanted to waste time — but cautioned that any meeting would require further “preparation.”
Trump's latest peace push hit a roadblock during a call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, according to senior figures on both sides.
Lavrov became "exercised" during the call, a Trump administration official told NBC News. He reiterated Russia's refusal to agree to an immediate ceasefire before talks begin, a key demand of Kyiv and Europe that the United States has backed.
“I don’t want to have a wasted meeting; I don’t want to have a waste of time,” Trump told reporters Tuesday, confirming earlier reports that the summit with Putin slated for the Hungarian capital of Budapest would be shelved. He declined to give details about how the talks broke down, saying he would “see what happens” as events unfolded.
Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded Wednesday that neither Trump nor Putin "wants to waste time." He told reporters that these were "two presidents who are accustomed to working effectively and efficiently, but effectiveness always requires preparation."
Ukraine says it is willing to agree to an immediate ceasefire along the current battle lines — despite concerns that would allow Russia to regroup and attack again. But Putin has not shifted from the hard-line demands underpinning his war.
The timing of a ceasefire "is the basic difference which is existing now between Russia and the United States,” Andrei Fedorov, former deputy foreign minister of Russia, told NBC News in an interview in Moscow on Wednesday.
It was during the Rubio-Lavrov call that “the conflict arose,” Fedorov said. Rubio said "he did not want to waste his time and president’s time if Russia was not prepared to discuss a ceasefire along the current front line," Fedorov said.
Whereas "Lavrov indicated that if the U.S. would not adhere to the Alaska agreement there would be no further talks," he added, referring to the Trump-Putin meeting in August.
Despite this, the would-be host of the Trump-Putin summit said it could still happen.
Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister who is a longtime ally of Trump’s and has warm relations with Putin, said that his ambassador in Washington was still working on the meeting.
“Preparations for the peace summit continue,” Orbán wrote on Facebook. “The date is still uncertain. When the time comes, we will organize it.”
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov also told state media that preparations for the summit were continuing.
Though Trump has claimed victories in helping calm other global conflicts, Ukraine — a war he once said he could solve in 24 hours — has so far proved more difficult. He has variously sought to strong-arm Zelenskyy and Putin with few tangible results.
Ukraine and its supporters point to Putin's repeated attacks on Ukrainian civilians as evidence that he is not interested in peace, and merely wants to use the negotiations to buy time for his military assault on his neighbor.
Tuesday night brought the latest barrage, more than 400 drones and 20-plus missiles, around 350 of which were shot down, Ukraine's air force command said. In all, at least 13 people were killed over the past 24 hours, according to officials early Wednesday.
Among the targets was a kindergarten in the eastern city of Kharkiv, killing at least one person and injuring seven others, Zelenskyy said.
“There is no justification for a drone strike on a kindergarten, nor can there ever be,” he said in a post. “Clearly, Russia is growing more brazen. These strikes are Russia’s spit in the face to everyone who insists on a peaceful resolution.”
The Russian Defense Ministry said it had targeted sites supporting "the operation of Ukraine’s military-industrial complex" with "high-precision long-range weapons."
Later Wednesday, Putin oversaw a previously planned test of Russia's nuclear forces, including the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile from northern Russia and a ballistic missile from a submarine in the Barents Sea, which sits between Russia and Scandinavia.
Zelenskyy called on Western allies to supply Ukraine with long-range missiles capable of striking deeper into Russia, saying that Moscow had been emboldened to up its attacks by Kyiv’s current lack of such capabilities.
“Russia continues to do everything to weasel out of diplomacy,” he said in his nightly address. “The greater Ukraine’s long-range reach, the greater Russia’s willingness to end the war.”
Earlier Tuesday, Ukraine announced that it had carried out a “massive combined missile and air strike” on Russia’s Bryansk chemical plant, some 60 miles across the border.
It was the latest attack in a weekslong campaign from Kyiv aimed at Putin's war machine and the fragile Russian economy.
Keir Simmons and Natasha Lebedeva reported from Moscow, Daryna Mayer from Kyiv and Alexander Smith from London.
