When President Trump talks this morning by telephone with President Putin about a Ukraine cease-fire, the American leader has a cudgel to use on the Russian — if he wants to. Senator Graham has won 73 co-sponsors for a “bone-crushing” Russia sanctions bill. White House aides signal that Mr. Trump could greenlight the bill if Mr. Putin does not play ball.

European leaders fear that Mr. Trump will not use it. Their aides charge that the American leader undercut them twice in the last week, breaking unity on a common front to push the Russian leader into a 30-day cease-fire. 

With today’s Trump-Putin call scheduled for 10 a.m. EST, the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy last night made a joint call to Mr. Trump. They  wanted to get in the last word in order to stiffen his resolve with Russian leaders. Mr. Trump promises to call them back later today. 

Separately yesterday, President Zelensky met at the American Embassy residence at Rome with Vice President Vance and Secretary Rubio. Taking place on the sidelines of Pope Leo XVI’s inauguration Mass, the meeting was designed to mend fences after the disastrous White House meeting in February. 

In a show of force before what the Kremlin calls a superpower call, Russia launched yesterday 273 drones at Ukrainian cities — its biggest such attack of the war. To further ratchet up tensions, Russia plans to launch shortly before the call a nuclear-capable intercontinental missile, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency reports.

“In order to demonstratively pressure and intimidate Ukraine, and also EU and NATO member states, the aggressor state of Russia intends to make a ‘training and combat’ launch of the RS-24 intercontinental ballistic missile from the Yars complex,” the Ukrainian agency said yesterday, referring to a missile with a range of 7,500 miles.

By reminding the world of Russia’s powerful nuclear arsenal, Mr. Putin is telling the Americans to back off. Behind this nuclear kabuki, Russia’s leader does not seem interested in a cease-fire or negotiating a peace treaty.

Last Friday, for Russia’s first peace talks with Ukraine in three years, Mr. Putin sent to Turkey a low-level delegation. Russia’s lead envoy was an arch-conservative, Vladimir Medinsky, chairman of the Russian Military-Historical Society.

“As Napoleon said, war and negotiations are always conducted at the same time,” Mr. Medinsky told Russian state TV, rejecting pressure by America and Europe for a cease-fire. During the closed-doors diplomatic meeting, he reportedly cited the Great Northern War, which ran between 1700 and 1721. He asked: “We fought Sweden for 21 years. How long are you ready to fight?”

In the talks, which lasted less than two hours, Russia’s envoy denounced Ukraine’s refusal to fully evacuate its soldiers from four regions partially occupied by Russia. He threatened: “Next time, it will be five regions.” He added, “Perhaps someone sitting at this table will lose more of their loved ones.”

Behind this bullying behavior stands Mr. Putin, a war leader who apparently believes he is winning. Despite the loss of almost 1 million killed or wounded Russian soldiers in the war, Mr. Putin reportedly looks forward to launching a new summer offensive. Last year, Russia lost 434,000 men killed or wounded to conquer 1,609 square miles — less than 1 percent of  Ukraine’s territory.

In a bid to break through Ukrainian lines this summer, Mr. Putin appointed on Thursday a new head of Russia’s land forces. Colonel General Andrei Mordvichev successfully commanded operations in the early part of the war, maneuvers that won him the sobriquet “General Breakthough.”

Accustomed to popularity jumps during wartime, Mr. Putin enjoys the role of war president. “Putin blossoms every time he talks about war,” an exiled Russian opposition politician, Maksim Katz, wrote last week on the Ekho Moskvy website. “In it, he is not an aging dictator, but a military leader, a character from some exciting film that is being shown in real-time 3D right around him.”

A Slavic literature professor, Gary Saul Morson, wrote recently in Commentary magazine of Mr. Putin: “Clear is his confidence that Russia can outlast its foes and that Western powers will tire of paying for a war before Russians tire of dying in it.”

In the essay titled, “Do Russians Worship War?” Mr. Morson adds that “Russia is most itself, and most noble, when it is utterly isolated, alone against the world. At such moments, Russian patriotism reaches its apogee.”

However, Russians face a war unlike any other in their 600 years as a unified state. In the Russia-Ukraine standoff, both sides have mounted “drone walls.” These make any advance along the 600-mile front line almost impossible. In fruitless attacks, the Russian army has lost thousands of tanks and armored personnel carriers. 

While new military tactics are to be tried this summer, Mr. Putin will also want to keep cease-fire talks alive. He cherishes the idea of a one-on-one, face-to-face summit with Mr. Trump. To this end, Friday’s talks at Istanbul yielded one concrete sweetener. Later this week, Russia and Ukraine are to swap 1,000 prisoners from each side — the biggest such exchange of the war.

Playing international hardball, Trump administration Cabinet members took to yesterday’s talk shows to signal that punishing sanctions wait in the wings. The Graham sanctions bill would place high tariffs on American imports from countries that buy Russian oil and gas.

“We’ve advised the Russians repeatedly, now for almost two months, that this was coming if no progress was made,” Mr. Rubio told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”  He claimed the congressional push for harsher sanctions is “an effort we couldn’t stop and don’t control.”

Secretary Bessent told NBC News’s ‘Meet the Press’ that Mr. Trump “has made it very clear, that if President Putin does not negotiate in good faith, that the United States will not hesitate to up the Russia sanctions, along with our European partners.”

Mr. Trump presented a positive spin on today’s call with his Russian counterpart, posting on Truth Social: “Hopefully it will be a productive day, a ceasefire will take place.”