Sunday is the twelfth day since the Trump-Putin call of April 29 — the ninety-minute conversation that produced the May 9-11 Victory Day truce — and no readout of a second call has been published by either the White House or the Kremlin. [1] The April 29 call remains the last public Trump-Putin transmission of the war's diplomatic register. The truce it produced has run since midnight Friday into a Russian Defense Ministry tally of 1,630 Ukrainian "violations" by noon Day One, a Kremlin claim of 264 Ukrainian drones downed, and a Victory Day parade staged in forty-five minutes without tanks, missiles, or cadet formations.

The paper's Saturday account opened the window on the call gap; Sunday holds it open. The structural fact is that the President who brokered a truce neither side intended to keep has not, by the available record, called the broker on the other side to discuss whether the truce is functioning. The four-day longest-previous-gap from February has been exceeded by eight days. The Office of the Press Secretary at the White House and the Kremlin Press Service have not responded to weekend inquiries.

Day 3 of the truce, by its own terms, runs through midnight Monday. The next visible test of the call window is whether the Trump administration moves to extend the truce, declare it broken, or treat it as having concluded by noon Tuesday Moscow time without a presidential statement on either side. The Iran window closes Wednesday. The Russian window may close in silence.

-- KATYA VOLKOV, Moscow