US president ‘impressed’ with Ukrainian drones hitting targets deep into Russia, say officials

Max Seddon in Berlin, Henry Foy in Oxford and Christopher Miller in New York

Published June 23, 2026

Russia has accused the US of abandoning efforts to broker an end to the war in Ukraine after Donald Trump appeared to be shifting again in favour of Kyiv.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday said the US was “seemingly stepping back from the role of an objective mediator” in the war and had “forgotten” about Trump’s own statements last year inching towards Moscow’s position. 

Instead, Trump was “hugely impressed and enthusiastic” about Ukraine’s recent campaign of long-range strikes on targets deep inside Russia at last week’s G7 summit, said two people briefed on the private discussions among the leaders. 

Trump at that summit also agreed to increase sanctions on Russian energy. Those strikes, which have since intensified with attacks on military targets around Moscow and an oil refinery on the outskirts of the city, are supported by US intelligence, which western allies have urged Washington to continue providing. 

Lavrov’s comments were the clearest sign yet of growing frustration in Russia that the US has not helped end President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, now in its fifth year, on terms favourable to Moscow. Russia, Lavrov said at a Moscow foreign policy conference, would “focus on achieving the goals of the [invasion] on the basis that all hopes the US could be an honest mediator collapsed long ago”.

As recently as March, US intelligence officials believed that Russia had the upper hand in the war. But in recent months, European diplomats noted that US officials appeared to have shifted and no longer felt that Moscow was winning the war. “They are not going to achieve the objectives they set out on day one, for certain,” secretary of state Marco Rubio told a Senate hearing this month. “They may not even be able to militarily ever achieve the objectives they’re demanding now in negotiations,” he said.

Senior Ukrainian administration officials have told the FT they see signs that Trump is warming to stronger support for Kyiv and may be more willing to pressure Russia to end its war. They remain sceptical about the US president’s follow-through, noting that he had made promises before that he did not keep and his history of speaking flatteringly about Putin. But they were cautiously optimistic after meetings between Zelenskyy, Trump and other leaders that progress had been made on Patriot interceptor missiles and western weapons licensing. 

One Ukrainian official said it would depend on further negotiations between Rustem Umerov, Kyiv’s secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, and US officials to hammer out the details. The official said Zelenskyy and Trump spoke at length during a dinner in Évian-les-Bains last week. Trump told Zelenskyy that he was impressed with Kyiv’s recent “military results”. 

Zelenskyy said after the meeting that Trump and Rubio had “responded positively to the issue of licences” for Patriot interceptor missiles “for the first time”. “Everyone agrees that we now have all the technical capabilities needed to begin producing missiles for Patriot systems,” Zelenskyy said. “What is needed now is President Trump’s personal approval,” he said. 

The American leader, he continued, “plans to ask US defence companies to establish licensed production of air-defence missiles in Europe and Ukraine”. 

Putin has previously helped derail Ukraine and EU efforts to sway Trump by calling him on the eve of important allied summits. But a call from the Russian president on Trump’s birthday a few days before the summit appeared to have little effect. “Russia should make a deal,” Trump said at the G7. “Russia’s lost tremendous amounts of people, and so has Ukraine,” he said, claiming that between the two of them, some 25,000 soldiers are killed each month. 

European capitals have seized on the apparent shift in Trump’s view on the conflict, and in particular his understanding that a Russian victory is not inevitable, to push for increased support to Kyiv. “When Ukraine is properly supplied, they can generate real operational effects,” said one senior Nato military official. “The Russian defensive lines are not impenetrable.”

Moscow has struggled to find an answer to Ukrainian technological advances, which have helped slow down its forces on the battlefield while inflicting major damage on infrastructure hundreds of kilometres into Russian territory. At a meeting with military academy graduates on Tuesday, Putin said that the Ukrainian strikes were acts of desperation at what he claimed were Russia’s unstoppable advances on the front. “These drones, strikes on civilian infrastructure. What are they for? To destabilise society . . . and create some sort of uncertainty about the Russian armed forces’ actions,” Putin said. 

Putin has accused western countries of preparing to attack Russia and likened the current situation to Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in the second world war. He said Russia was prepared to “react to any external and internal threats in a timely and appropriate manner”. 

Russia has continued to back a US-led peace process, stalled since the war in the Middle East began in late February. Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy spokesman, said on Tuesday that Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner were expected to visit Moscow once the US seals a framework peace agreement with Iran.

Behind the scenes, however, Russian frustration with the US has been building since last summer, according to western diplomats and people involved in back-channel efforts to end the war. 

Russia felt Witkoff misconstrued its position leading up to a meeting between Putin and Trump in Alaska last August, which ended contentiously after it emerged the sides were considerably further apart than they had believed. 

The White House has denied this. Though Trump released a statement shortly afterwards in which he abandoned his own push for an immediate ceasefire and appeared to endorse Putin’s demands for a permanent settlement, the US has since swung back to its initial position. 

Trump’s mercurial approach, combined with what some in Moscow see as Witkoff and Kushner’s freewheeling diplomacy, had led Russia to lose the faith it had placed in Trump to help secure Putin’s maximalist goals for the invasion, the people said. 

Lavrov appeared to nod to that shift in Russia’s thinking. “I don’t even want to suspect that Alaska, just like Europe’s actions, was conceived to win time to keep arming the Kyiv regime,” Lavrov said. “But what happened happened.” 

Additional reporting by Amy Mackinnon in Washington