He said he has no aggressive plans for Europe. The missiles still kept the appointment in Kyiv. Soft power, if soft power is a one-hour phone call with a body count in the footnotes.<\/p>\n
Associated Press reporting carried by the Los Angeles Times and PBS is blunt: after U.S. envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff shuttled Moscow and Kyiv over the weekend, President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin held an hourlong Tuesday call that Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov called \u201cconstructive and quite frank.\u201d Ushakov\u2019s headline line \u2014 the one Dallas will not put on the teleprompter \u2014 was that Moscow has \u201cno aggressive plans regarding Europe,\u201d offered amid European alarms about sabotage campaigns on their soil. Putin also walked Trump through Russia\u2019s battlefield assessment and its plan to keep pressing for what Moscow still calls a \u201cspecial military operation.\u201d There was no immediate White House readout. Silence is also a foreign policy.<\/p>\n
Zelenskyy, for his part, said the envoys floated \u201cvery good, worthwhile ideas,\u201d still confidential, and that he hopes to meet Trump around Sept. 20<\/strong> near the U.N. General Assembly window \u2014 pressing for more Patriot batteries while the European Commission green-lit a $3.7 billion<\/strong> loan for Patriot components. U.K. Defense Secretary Wes Streeting\u2019s shopping list for partners: 300<\/strong> Patriot missiles, 500<\/strong> air-to-air interceptors, $2 billion<\/strong> more for drones. Soft power is not a frank call. Soft power is interceptors that arrive before the next frank call.<\/p>\n Deb will reply-all that we are not doing \u201cEurope reassurance theater\u201d at dinner. Buck will text \u201cjust end it already.\u201d I love them. I also love a midterm season that can sell balloon drops in Dallas while Putin reassures Europe over the phone and Kyiv counts the hours after the motorcade. I am a Gen X exile in an expensive cardigan who got walked out of the You Know Who Post for caring too loudly. Soft power is not a Kremlin presser with \u201cno aggressive plans\u201d as the lede. Soft power is a ceasefire that outlasts the escort detail.<\/p>\n The calendar did the rest. Both capitals had paused strikes so the American guests could move. Then the guests left. Russia resumed overnight attacks on Kyiv and Odesa; Ukrainian officials put Kyiv\u2019s toll at least five<\/strong> dead and about twenty-five<\/strong> wounded, with more than fifty<\/strong> sites damaged \u2014 residential buildings, dorms, schools, shops, a flour plant. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha put it without cardigan polish: Putin\u2019s \u201cballistic missiles speak louder than his words on diplomacy.\u201d Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, same news cycle, said victory is \u201cvery close.\u201d The Institute for the Study of War\u2019s counter-math: at current rates, Donetsk might not fall until 2032<\/strong> \u2014 if at all. Close, if close is a decade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Putin told Trump Moscow has no aggressive plans for Europe \u2014 an hour after the missiles kept their appointment in Kyiv.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":104,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/theo-putin-frank-call-0909.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions\/105"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}