<\/a>Earlier on Friday, European nations agreed \u20ac21bn ($24bn; \u00a318bn) in\u00a0military aid for Kyiv.<\/p>\nAt the event, Europe\u2019s defence ministers said they saw no sign of an end to the war.<\/p>\n
Ahead of the Putin-Witkoff talks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there was \u201cno need to expect breakthroughs\u201d as the \u201cprocess of normalising relations is ongoing\u201d.<\/p>\n
Asked whether discussions could include setting up a date for Putin and Trump to meet, Peskov said: \u201cLet\u2019s see. It depends on what Witkoff has come with.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beforehand, Witkoff had a meeting with Dmitriev at the Grand Hotel Europe in St Petersburg, where a conference was held on stainless steel and the Russian market.<\/p>\n
Dmitriev, the 49-year-old head of Russia\u2019s sovereign wealth fund, visited Washington last week and was the most senior Russian official to go to the US since the country\u2019s full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile Ukraine\u2019s President Volodymyr Zelensky accused the Kremlin of prolonging the war during a visit on Friday to the site of a 4 April Russian missile attack on his home town of Kryvyi Rih. The attack killed 19 people, including nine children.<\/p>\n
He also alleged that hundreds of Chinese nationals were fighting with the Russian army. It comes after Ukraine said it had captured two Chinese nationals.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have information that at least several hundred Chinese nationals are fighting as part of Russia\u2019s occupation forces,\u201d Zelensky said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis means Russia is clearly trying to prolong the war even by using Chinese lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zelensky laid flowers in front of photos of Herman Tripolets, nine, and seven-year-olds Arina Samodina and Radyslav Yatsko.<\/p>\n
He later reiterated a call for air defence systems \u201cto protect lives and our cities\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe discussed this with President Trump \u2013 Ukraine is not just asking, we\u2019re ready to purchase these additional systems,\u201d he wrote on social media.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly powerful weapons can truly be relied upon to protect life when you have a neighbour like Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump has previously claimed he could end the Ukraine-Russia conflict \u201cin 24 hours\u201d. On Friday, he declared that it would not have happened at all if he\u2019d been in the White House in 2022 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion.<\/p>\n
\u201cA war that should ld [sic] have never happened, and wouldn\u2019t have happened, if I were President!!!,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
In February US and Russian officials\u00a0met in Saudi Arabia\u00a0for their first face-to-face talks since the invasion. Officials have also been meeting to discuss restoring full diplomatic relations.<\/p>\n
Trump has also had a\u00a0fractious relationship with Zelensky\u00a0since his second term as US president began, culminating in an angry confrontation in the Oval Office in February.<\/p>\n
The US attempted to broker a limited ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia in the Black Sea, only for it to stall when the Kremlin asked for sanctions imposed after it launched its full-scale invasion of its neighbour to be lifted.<\/p>\n
Trump has since said he is \u201cvery angry\u201d and \u201cpissed off\u201d with Putin over the lack of progress in agreeing a truce between Kyiv and Moscow<\/p>\n
4:42Watch in full: The remarkable exchange between Zelensky, Vance and Trump<\/p>\n
Russia\u2019s ambassador to the UK, Andrei Kelin, told the BBC\u2019s\u00a0Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg\u00a0that the US is not its ally.<\/p>\n
He said America and Russia had not been able to go from \u201ctotal distrust to alignment in two months\u201d since Trump returned to the White House.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have too many disagreements,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we are working on these disagreements step by step in different areas.\u201d<\/p>\n
Earlier this week, Washington and Moscow went ahead with a\u00a0prisoner swap.<\/p>\n
Ksenia Karelina, a Russian-American, was sentenced to 12 years in jail in Russia for donating $51 to a Ukrainian charity when the war began in February 2022.<\/p>\n
The Los Angeles resident was freed on Thursday morning and exchanged for Arthur Petrov, a dual German-Russian citizen arrested in Cyprus in 2023.<\/p>\n
He was accused of illegally exporting microelectronics to Russia for manufacturers working with the military.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US envoy Steve Witkoff met Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg on Friday, as Donald Trump urged the Russian president to \u201cget moving\u201d on a ceasefire in Ukraine. The Kremlin said the meeting lasted for more than four hours and focused on \u201caspects of a Ukrainian settlement\u201d. The talks, Witkoff\u2019s third with Putin this year, were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113539\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}