With little progress after phone calls and talks, Ukraine's allies hit Russia with new sanctions

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Kyiv's European allies slapped new sanctions Tuesday on Moscow, a day after a phone call between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to produce a breakthrough on ending the 3-year-old war in Ukraine.

“We have made clear again and again that we simply expect one thing from Russia now: namely, a ceasefire, unconditional and immediate,” German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said in addressing the sanctions. “We welcome the fact that Ukraine is still prepared to do this. We note with disappointment that Russia has not yet taken this decisive step, and we will have to react to this.”

Diplomatic efforts have seen little progress in halting the fighting, including Monday's phone call between Trump and Putin, and Friday's direct talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Istanbul. In the phone call, Putin promised Trump that Russia is “ready to work with” Ukraine on a “memorandum” outlining the framework for “a possible future peace treaty.”

“It appears that Putin has devised a way to offer Trump an interim, tangible outcome from Washington’s peace efforts without making any real concessions,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, in a post on X.

Russian media struck a triumphal tone in reporting Putin’s conversation with Trump.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on his Telegram channel that "it is obvious that Russia is trying to buy time to continue the war and occupation. We are working with partners to put pressure on the Russians to behave differently.”

The new European Union sanctions targeted almost 200 ships from Russia's “shadow fleet” illicitly transporting oil to skirt Western restrictions It also imposed asset freezes and travel bans on several officials as well as on a number of Russian companies.

Ukrainian officials have said about 500 aging ships of uncertain ownership and safety practices are dodging sanctions and keeping oil revenues flowing to Moscow.

The U.K. also targeted the shadow fleet with 100 new sanctions and also aimed at disrupting the supply chains of Russian weapons, officials said.

“Putin’s latest strikes once again show his true colors as a warmonger,” British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said.

But Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said Tuesday: "Russia never responds to ultimatums.”

Trump has threatened to step up sanctions and tariffs on Russia but hasn’t acted so far.

Ukraine has offered a comprehensive 30-day ceasefire, which Moscow has effectively rejected by imposing far-reaching conditions, and Zelenskyy proposed a face-to-face meeting with Putin last week but the Russian leader spurned that offer.

Trump, who had pledged during his campaign to end the war in one day, said his personal intervention was needed to push peace efforts forward. He held separate phone calls with both Putin and Zelenskyy, and said the two countries would “immediately” begin ceasefire negotiations, but there were no details on when or where such talks might take place.

“The status quo has not changed,” Mykhailo Podoliak, a senior adviser to Zelenskyy, wrote on the social platform X on Tuesday.

Russia launched 108 Shahed and decoy drones at Ukraine overnight, the Ukrainian air force said. One drone dropped explosives on a passenger bus in the Dniprovskyi district of the Kherson region, injuring two people, the local administration said.

Putin wants Ukraine to renounce joining NATO, sharply cut its military, and withdraw its forces from the four Ukrainian regions Moscow has seized but doesn’t fully control, among other demands to curb the country's sovereignty.

After the phone call, the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti published an article headlined, “Europe’s hopes crushed: Trump refuses to go to war with Putin."

In the pro-Kremlin tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets, columnist Mikhail Rostovsky also portrayed the call as a blow for Ukraine’s European allies.

“Kyiv will agree to a serious, fully fledged conversation with Russia only if it has no other options left. Trump is gradually cutting off these other options for Zelenskyy,” he wrote. “And this is very, very good.”

Since Trump took office, Washington has urged Russia and Ukraine to end Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II.

After Monday's phone calls, European officials remained skeptical about Russia's intentions.

“Putin has never changed his position,” Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur said in Brussels. “Russia actually doesn’t want to end this war.”

EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said Russia’s failure to negotiate in good faith should trigger the threatened U.S. sanctions.

“We really haven’t seen, you know, the pressure on Russia from these talks,” she said.

In Kyiv, there was skepticism about Putin’s motives.

Peace “is not possible now. Only when (the Russians) run out of resources and army manpower. They are ready to fight, at least for this summer,” Svitlana Kyryliuk, 66, told The Associated Press. Putin will “stall for time, and that’s it,” she said.

Volodymyr Lysytsia, a 45-year-old serviceman visiting the capital for rehabilitation, said Putin has made the front lines in eastern Ukraine a wasteland, with “nothing there, only scorched earth, everything bombed.”

Some were unconvinced by Putin’s promise to Trump that Russia is “ready to work with” Ukraine on a “memorandum” outlining the framework for “a possible future peace treaty.”

The first direct Russia-Ukraine peace talks since the early weeks of Moscow’s 2022 invasion ended after less than two hours Friday, and while both sides agreed on a large prisoner swap, they clearly remained far apart on key conditions to end the fighting.

Lorne Cook in Brussels, Katie Marie Davies in Manchester, England, and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed.

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks to journalists after his phone talks with U.S. President Donald Trump at the Sirius Park of Science and Art outside Sochi, Russia, on Monday, May 19, 2025. (Vyacheslav Prokofyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Germany's Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul speaks with the media as he arrives for a meeting of EU foreign ministers at the European Council building in Brussels, Belgium, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, second right, is greeted by European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas during a meeting of EU foreign ministers at the European Council building in Brussels, Belgium, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (Olivier Matthys, Pool Photo via AP)

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha arrives for a meeting of EU foreign ministers at the European Council building in Brussels, Belgium, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo, Pool)

FILE - An oil tanker is moored at the Sheskharis complex, part of Chernomortransneft JSC, a subsidiary of Transneft PJSC, in Novorossiysk, Russia, on Oct. 11, 2022. (AP Photo, File)

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha arrives for a meeting of EU foreign ministers at the European Council building in Brussels, Belgium, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo, Pool)

European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas speaks with the media as she arrives for a meeting of EU defense ministers at the European Council building in Brussels, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)

Norway's Crown Prince Haakon arrives at the train station in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (Heiko Junge/NTB Scanpix via AP)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks during a briefing in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, May 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)