Ukraine Russia war live: Trump could meet Putin and Zelensky ‘as soon as next week’ after US envoy’s Russia visit

President Donald Trump could meet in person with Russian president Vladimir Putin as soon as next week in his bid to continue to negotiate for an end to the Russia-Ukraine war, a White House official has said.

The official added that a meeting has not been scheduled yet and no location has been determined.

The White House said Trump was also open to a meeting with both Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Trump, appearing before reporters later at the White House, didn’t answer questions about a potential location for a meeting but when asked about a summit with Putin and Zelensky, said “there’s a very good prospect that they will” meet.

However, the president declined to predict how close he was to reaching a deal to end the fighting, saying, “I’ve been disappointed before with this one.”

Ukrainians are increasingly eager for a settlement that ends the fight against Russia’s invasion, according to a new Gallup poll published today.

In the survey conducted in early July, about seven in 10 Ukrainians say their country should seek to negotiate a settlement as soon as possible.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky last month renewed his offer to meet with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, but his overture was rebuffed as Russia sticks to its demands, and the sides remain far apart.

Most Ukrainians do not expect a lasting peace anytime soon, the poll found. Only about one-quarter say it’s “very” or “somewhat” likely that active fighting will end within the next 12 months, while about seven in 10 think it’s “somewhat” or “very” unlikely that active fighting will be over in the next year.

The enthusiasm for a negotiated deal is a sharp reversal from 2022 — the year the war began — when Gallup found that about three-quarters of Ukrainians wanted to keep fighting until victory.

Now only about one-quarter hold that view, with support for continuing the war declining steadily across all regions and demographic groups.

The findings were based on samples of 1,000 or more respondents ages 15 and older living in Ukraine. Some territories under entrenched Russian control, representing about 10 per cent of the population, were excluded from surveys conducted after 2022 due to lack of access.

A face-to-face meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin would be the first between a sitting US and Russian president since Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva in June 2021.

This came eight months before Russia launched the biggest attack on a European nation since the Second World War.

Trump himself last met Putin in Helsinki in 2018 where the two men held nearly two hours of closed-door talks in the capital city.

In March this year, Putin gifted Trump a portrait of the US president commissioned by him and sent via Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff when he was in Moscow for a meeting.

Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky have not met since December 2019 and make no secret of their contempt for each other.

However, Zelensky has issued open invitations to his Russian counterpart for a face-to-face meeting to negotiate an end to the war.

A fire has broken out at the Afipsky oil refinery in Russia’s Krasnodar region due to falling drone debris, local emergency services said this morning.

The fire was extinguished soon after it started, the local emergency services added.

The Russian defence ministry said that air defence systems had shot down nine Ukrainian drones over the region overnight.

At least two people were killed and 12, including two children, were injured in Russian attacks from Tuesday overnight into Wednesday, officials said.

Russian forces hit a recreational centre in Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region yesterday, regional governor Ivan Fedorov said.

Russian forces launched at least four strikes on the area and initially attacked with powerful glide bombs.

“There is zero military sense in this strike. Only cruelty to intimidate,” Volodymyr Zelensky said in a post on Telegram.

Russia also struck the Ukrainian power grid and facilities for heating and cooking gas, Mr Zelensky said, as Ukraine makes preparations for winter.

Western analysts and Ukrainian officials say Russian president Vladimir Putin is stalling for time and avoiding serious negotiations while Russian forces push to capture more Ukraine land.

A Russian offensive that started in the spring and is expected to continue through the fall is advancing faster than last year’s push but is making only slow and costly gains and has been unable to take any major cities.

The situation on the frontline is critical for Ukrainian forces but defences are not about to collapse, analysts say.

It may be that, much against his intentions both in the campaign last year and in his diplomacy during his first term, President Trump may well be soon “done” with Putin. That opens up a whole new dimension of uncertainty.

Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff met with Vladimir Putin in Moscow yesterday, which the US president lauded as “a highly productive meeting” in which “great progress was made.”

Witkoff met with Putin days before the White House’s deadline for Russia to reach a peace deal with Ukraine or potentially face severe economic penalties that could also hit countries buying its oil. The meeting between Putin and Witkoff lasted about three hours, the Kremlin said. Putin’s foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov said Putin and Witkoff had a “useful and constructive conversation” that focused on the Ukrainian crisis and, in a nod toward improving relations between Washington and Moscow, “prospects for possible development of strategic cooperation” between the United States and Russia. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said after the meeting that Trump intends to meet with both Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. Additionally, two people familiar with the matter said Trump could hold a bilateral meeting with Putin followed by a trilateral meeting with Zelensky as soon as next week, reported the New York Times.

Volodymyr Zelensky thanked Ukrainian forces who carried out the country’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk oblast a year ago as he marked the anniversary.

Ukrainian forces pushed into Kursk on 6 August last year in a surprise attack, with battle-hardened mechanised units quickly overwhelming lightly armed Russian border guards and inexperienced army conscripts. Hundreds were taken prisoner.

The incursion was a humiliating blow to the Kremlin – the first time the country’s territory was occupied by an invader since the Second World War.

“Today marks the anniversary of the Kursk operation – a truly Ukrainian historic operation. We brought the war onto the territory of the aggressor state and are still operating on its territory. At a time when many spoke that the situation had reached a stalemate, and were losing faith in Ukraine, we proved that Ukrainians know how to act right,” he said in his nightly address.

Ukraine proved that many of Russia’s threats were just bluffs, he said.

“Thirteen hundred kilometres of Russian territory were under our control. And this forced the Russians not only to pull their forces away from the Donetsk region, but also to ask North Korea for help,” Zelensky said, calling the historic incursion “the most important chapters of this war”.

Chris Stevenson explains why Ukraine launched an audacious cross-border attack on Putin’s forces in Russia:

The US has a better understanding of the conditions under which Russia would be prepared to end its war in Ukraine after president Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff met with Vladimir Putin, secretary of state Marco Rubio said.

The key elements of any ceasefire agreement would involve territory, he said.

“For the first time perhaps since this administration began, we have some concrete examples of the kinds of things that Russia would ask for in order to end the war,” Rubio said in an interview with Fox Business Network’s “Kudlow”.