German minister says ‘Putin playing a game’ – DW – 03/19/2025

The European Union’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said that Russia cannot be trusted and that President Vladimir Putin’s call with US President Donald Trump showed Russia wasn’t interested in making “concessions” on Ukraine.

“If you read the two readouts from the call, it is clear that Russia does not really want to make any kind of concessions,” Kallas told reporters in Brussels.

She also insisted the Kremlin’s demands to stop arming Kyiv can’t be accepted. “What Russia wants is that Ukraine will let all the guards down,” Kallas said.

“If they achieve that no military aid to Ukraine, then they are free to continue, because the Ukrainians can’t defend themselves. So I mean, clearly this can’t work,” she added.

Putin declined to endorse a full 30-day ceasefire, which Trump had hoped would be the first step toward a permanent peace deal, but the leaders agreed to a scaled-back commitment to halt attacks on energy infrastructure for 30 days.

Within hours of the call, Moscow unleashed a new barrage of airstrikes. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia had hit civilian infrastructure, including a hospital, and accused the Kremlin of effectively rejecting the US-backed ceasefire.

Ukraine said Russian forces fired six missiles and 145 drones at the country overnight. The barrage of strikes on civilian infrastructure, which authorities said killed one person and damaged two hospitals.

It came hours after Moscow agreed to halt attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump agreed in a phone call that Russia and Ukraine stop attacking each other’s energy infrastructure for 30 days.

The Ukrainian air force said its air defense units had shot down 72 of 145 drones, but did not mention the missiles.

The general prosecutor’s office said a hospital in the northeastern Sumy region was hit late Tuesday and that 21 staff and 147 patients were in the facility at the time of the attack. Prosecutors said a 29-year-old man was killed and three other residents were wounded in a separate Russian attack on a residential building in the region, which borders Russia.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s national railway service said a railway power infrastructure in the central Dnipropetrovsk region had been hit by drones. Services were not interrupted, it added.

Germany accused President Vladimir Putin of “playing a game” following Russian strikes on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure after the Russian leader agreed to temporarily halt attacks on energy facilities.

“We’ve seen that attacks on civilian infrastructure have not eased at all in the first night after this supposedly ground-breaking, great phone call” between Putin and US President Donald Trump, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said in a TV interview, adding that “Putin is playing a game.”

The German minister also described as “unacceptable” the Kremlin’s insistence that a “key condition” for peace would be a complete halt to Western military and intelligence support for Ukraine’s embattled military.

“This is very transparent,” Pistorius said, adding that Putin aimed to prevent Kyiv’s backers from “further supporting Ukraine and enabling it to really defend itself if there is another attack, during or after a ceasefire.”

Just hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed in a phone call with US President Donald Trump to halt attacks on energy facilities, Russia attacked Ukrainian civilian infrastructure with more than 140 drones and several missiles.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia had hit civilian infrastructure, including a hospital, and accused the Kremlin of effectively rejecting the US-backed ceasefire.

We will look at the fallout from the strikes and report on the the Russia, Ukraine prisoner swap later on Wednesday.