Washington, DC, 04 February (H.S.): President Donald Trump issued a stark exhortation to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, (February 3, 2026), beseeching an immediate cessation to the nearly four-year Ukraine conflagration, even as Moscow unleashed renewed drone and missile salvos upon Kyiv, contravening a week-long frigid interlude.

Responding to an Agence France-Presse inquiry within the Oval Office, Trump avowed, I want him to end the war, registering tempered disappointment that Putin declined to extend the respite, yet lauding the Kremlin's fidelity to a professed strike moratorium spanning the preceding Sunday to this one—quipping pragmatically, It's a lot, you know, one week, we'll take anything, because it's really, really cold over there.

The Kremlin's resurgence—deploying 450 drones alongside 70 missiles in its most ferocious power-grid onslaught to date—shattered the tactical hiatus ostensibly dictated by Arctic climes, triggering Kyiv's air raid sirens and amplifying the conflict's toll since February 2022, as Ukrainian batteries intercepted volleys amid NATO chief's visit.

Trump's unvarnished appeal, proffered during his sophomore term's nascent diplomacy—flanked by a freshly ratified spending pact staving U.S. fiscal paralysis—recasts him as putative conciliator, even as Putin's winter thaw yields to scorched-earth reprisals, dimming cease-fire horizons for a war-weary Europe.

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Hindusthan Samachar / Jun Sarkar