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President Donald Trump told reporters on Sunday that U.S. officials have determined Ukraine did not target a residence belonging to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a drone attack last week, disputing a Kremlin claim that earlier appeared to line up with the Russian government’s account.
Trump said he “don’t believe that strike happened” and told reporters that U.S. officials had been able to “check” and did not find that Putin’s residence was targeted. Speaking aboard Air Force One as he traveled back to Washington after spending time at his home in Florida, Trump described what happened nearby as not amounting to a strike on the Russian president’s residence.
The dispute traces to a claim made by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who said last week that Ukraine launched a wave of drones at Putin’s state residence in the northwestern Novgorod region and that Russia’s defenses were able to defeat the drones. Lavrov also criticized Kyiv for launching the attack at a moment of “intensive negotiations” to end the war.
Ukraine’s response came quickly. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy denied the Kremlin allegation shortly after it was raised, according to the reporting that accompanied Trump’s remarks. The Kremlin claim appeared about a day after Zelenskyy traveled to Florida to hold talks with Trump tied to the U.S. administration’s still-evolving 20-point plan aimed at ending the war.
Trump’s position also reflected a shift from earlier days. The reporting said that Trump initially appeared to take the Russian allegations at face value, including when he said last Monday that Putin had raised the matter during a phone call earlier that day. By Wednesday, Trump was described as downplaying the Russian claim, including by sharing a link to a New York Post editorial on his social media platform that questioned Moscow’s account.
European officials had also argued the Kremlin claim was aimed at undermining the peace effort. Trump, in the broader comments described in the reporting, addressed the U.S. determination after those arguments, and he contrasted the Russian assertion with what U.S. officials said they found during their review.
The drone-attack allegation and Trump’s response landed against the backdrop of stalled and contentious diplomacy over ending the Russia-Ukraine war. The reporting said Trump has struggled to fulfill a pledge to quickly end the war and has shown irritation with both Zelenskyy and Putin while he has tried to mediate an end to the conflict.
At the same time, the reporting said Russia has indicated it is not interested in ending the war until its objectives are met. Those objectives include winning control of all Ukrainian territory in the key industrial Donbas region and imposing severe restrictions on the size of Ukraine’s post-war military and the type of weapons it can possess.