Zelenskyy to fly to Washington as Merz says US ready to be part of Ukraine security guarantees – as it happened

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, told Donald Trump that he would freeze the frontline in the southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in exchange for the Donetsk region of Ukraine, the Financial Times reports.

The Russian leader made the request during his meeting with Trump in Alaska on Friday, the FT said, citing four people with direct knowledge of the talks.

In a statement posted on the social media platform X earlier on Saturday, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said: “All issues important to Ukraine must be discussed with Ukraine’s participation, and no issue, particularly territorial ones, can be decided without Ukraine.”

European leaders are invited to attend a Monday meeting with US president Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House, the New York Times reported on Saturday, citing two senior European officials.

The meeting comes after a summit between Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday, which Washington said resulted in “great progress” but no deal to end the conflict in Ukraine.

Two people, a 52-year-old man and his 13-year-old son, were killed in a Ukrainian drone strike on Russia’s Kursk region, the local governor said on Saturday.

In a statement published on Telegram, the Kursk governor, Alexander Khinshtein, said that the two had been killed when their car caught fire as a result of a drone strike.

Khinshtein said that the attack took place in Rylsk district, a border area close to the part of Kursk region that Ukraine occupied between August 2024 and March this year.

The “coalition of the willing” leaders will meet via video conference on Sunday afternoon ahead of president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to Washington on Monday, the French presidency office said on Saturday.

The meeting will be co-presided by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, the office said.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that Russia may step up its attacks on Ukraine following the inconclusive Putin-Trump summit and the news that the Ukrainian leader would fly to Washington to meet the US president on Monday. In a post on X, he wrote:

Based on the political and diplomatic situation around Ukraine, and knowing Russia’s treachery, we anticipate that in the coming days the Russian army may try to increase pressure and strikes against Ukrainian positions in order to create more favorable political circumstances for talks with global actors.

Agence France-Presse has been speaking to some ordinary Ukrainians to get their view of the summit, and it’s fair to say they are pretty unimpressed.

Pavlo Nebroev stayed up until the middle of the night in Kharkiv, which has suffered repeated Russian bombardments, to wait for the press conference. The 38-year-old theatre manager said:

I saw the results I expected. I think this is a great diplomatic victory for Putin. He has completely legitimised himself.”

Nebroev, like many Ukrainians, was gobsmacked the meeting could take place without representatives of his country.

This was a useless meeting. Issues concerning Ukraine should be resolved with Ukraine, with the participation of Ukrainians, the president.”

Olya Donik, 36, said she was not surprised by the turn of events as she walked through a sunny park in Kharkiv with Nebroev.

“It ended with nothing. Alright, let’s continue living our lives here in Ukraine,” she said.

“Whether there are talks or not, Kharkiv is being shelled almost every day. Kharkiv definitely doesn’t feel any change,” said Iryna Derkach, a 50-year-old photographer.

We believe in victory, we know it will come, but God only knows who exactly will bring it about”.

Derkach, like many Ukrainians, was suspicious of Trump. “We do our job and don’t pay too much attention to what Trump is doing,” she added.

Pharmacist Larysa Melnyk did not think her country was any closer to seeing peace.

“I don’t think there will be a truce,” she told AFP, adding that even if the guns fall silent, it will only be temporarily.

Russia’s reaction to Donald Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska has been nothing short of jubilant, with Moscow celebrating the fact that the Russian leader met his US counterpart without making concessions and now faces no sanctions despite rejecting Trump’s ceasefire demands.

“The meeting proved that negotiations are possible without preconditions,” wrote former president Dmitry Medvedev on Telegram. He added that the summit showed that talks could continue as Russia wages war in Ukraine.

Trump entered the high-stakes summit warning, “I won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of a ceasefire,” and threatening “severe consequences” if Moscow refused to cooperate.

But after a three-hour meeting with the Russian side that yielded no tangible results, Trump shelved his threats and instead insisted that the meeting was “extremely productive,” even as Putin clung to his maximalist demands for ending the war and announced no concessions on the battlefield, where Russian forces are consolidating key gains in eastern Ukraine.

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The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said in a post on X that strong security guarantees for Ukraine and Europe were “essential” in any peace deal to end the war in Ukraine.

“The EU is working closely with Zelenskyy and the United States to reach a just and lasting peace. Strong security guarantees that protect Ukrainian and European vital security interests are essential,” von der Leyen posted on Saturday.

The EU leaders are emphasising the issue of security guarantees, something Ukraine has been seeking as the minimum feature to secure its future ability to defend itself in the absence of membership of Nato, which is still wants.

In a statement posted on the social media platform X, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said: “Security must be guaranteed reliably and in the long term, with the involvement of both Europe and the US.

“All issues important to Ukraine must be discussed with Ukraine’s participation, and no issue, particularly territorial ones, can be decided witout Ukraine.”

He said that Ukraine needed a real, long-lasting peace and not “just another pause” between Russian invasions, and stressed to Trump during their call that sanctions should be strengthened.

The Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has said that the discussion of security guarantees was area where “most interesting developments” happened during the Trump-Putin Alaska summit, Reuters reported on Saturday.

Meloni also said that Trump has followed the Italian idea of security guarantees “inspired by Nato’s article 5”.

In Trump’s debriefing to European leaders after the Alaska summit with Putin, there were discussions about security guarantees for Ukraine, which is outside Nato.

A source familiar with the matter told Reuters that the guarantees would be equivalent to article 5, which states that if a Nato ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this as an armed attack against all members.

In a joint statement published earlier today, the European Council said: “No limitations should be placed on Ukraine’s armed forces or on its cooperation with third countries. Russia cannot have a veto against Ukraine’s pathway to EU and Nato.”

The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, has released an official statement on Ukraine after the Alaska summit held between president Trump and president Putin.

The statement said: “President Trump’s efforts have brought us closer than ever before to ending Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine. His leadership in pursuit of an end to the killing should be commended.”

It echoed the joint statement released by the European Council by reiterating: “the next step must be further talks involving President Zelenskyy. The path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without him.”

Starmer continued: “This morning, I spoke to President Zelenskyy, President Trump and other European partners, and we all stand ready to support this next phase.

I welcome the openness of the United States, alongside Europe, to provide robust security guarantees to Ukraine as part of any deal. This is important progress and will be crucial in deterring Putin from coming back for more.

In the meantime, until he stops his barbaric assault, we will keep tightening the screws on his war machine with even more sanctions, which have already had a punishing impact on the Russian economy and its people.

Our unwavering support for Ukraine will continue as long as it takes.”

The European Council have released a joint statement by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, the Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, the European Council president, António Costa and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen.

The statement, in response to Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska which secured no peace agreement, said: “Leaders welcomed President Trump’s efforts to stop the killing in Ukraine, end Russia’s war of aggression, and achieve just and lasting peace.

As President Trump said ‘there’s no deal until there’s a deal’. As envisioned by President Trump, the next step must now be further talks including President Zelenskyy, whom he will meet soon.

We are also ready to work with President Trump and President Zelenskyy towards a trilateral summit with European support.”

The statement emphasised that “Ukraine must have ironclad security guarantees to effectively defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity. We welcome President Trump’s statement that the US is prepared to give security guarantees. The coalition of the willing is ready to play an active role. No limitations should be placed on Ukraine’s armed forces or on its cooperation with third countries. Russia cannot have a veto against Ukraine’s pathway to EU and Nato.

It will be up to Ukraine to make decisions on its territory. International borders must not be changed by force.”

It added: “Our support to Ukraine will continue. We are determined to do more to keep Ukraine strong in order to achieve an end to the fighting and a just and lasting peace.

As long as the killing in Ukraine continues, we stand ready to uphold the pressure on Russia. We will continue to strengthen sanctions and wider economic measures to put pressure on Russia’s war economy until there is a just and lasting peace.

Ukraine can count on our unwavering solidarity as we work towards a peace that safeguards Ukraine’s and Europe’s vital security interests.”

The Russian defence ministry has said its forces have taken Kolodyazi village in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, according to state media reports on Saturday.

Russian state media also reported that forces have taken Vorone village in the neighbouring Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine.

The Guardian could not independently verify battlefield reports.

President Donald Trump has said that Ukrainian president Zelenskyy will be coming to the DC Oval Office on Monday afternoon, Reuters reports.

The report added that “if it all works out”, Trump intends to “schedule a meeting with president Putin”.

According to Reuters, Trump has said during the Alaska summit it was determined that the best way to end the war in Ukraine is “to go directly to a peace deal, not ceasefire”.

We will have more on this as the story develops.

There has been speculation on the social media platform X about an air ceasefire, according to reports from Oliver Carroll, a foreign correspondent for the Economist.

Carroll said on Saturday: “I’m told there is provisional agreement of an air ceasefire until 3-way leaders meeting. ‘We think the skies will give signals about provisional results of these talks,’ source tells me. ‘The next week will be interesting.’”

Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s communication adviser Dmytro Lytvyn responded to the post, writing: “We haven’t heard anything about it yet”.

There have been no reports of a ceasefire deal from Washington or Moscow.

During what was billed as a joint news conference after the Alaska summit, Putin claimed that some sort of agreement had been reached, but Trump said that there had been ‘no deal’ and then abruptly ended the event, taking no questions.

A blast at a factory in the Russian region of Ryazan on Friday killed 11 people and left 130 injured, Russia’s emergencies ministry said on Saturday.

In a statement on Telegram, the ministry said rescuers were continuing to search through rubble at the scene of the blast, 200 miles (320km) south-east of Moscow.

The Ryazan regional governor, Pavel Malkov, said on Friday that the incident had been triggered by a fire breaking out inside a workshop at the factory.

There was no cause given for the fire, not was it clear what the factory produced. Ukrainian drones have previously targeted military and economic infrastructure in Ryazan region. In January, a major oil refinery and power station had been hit by Ukrainian drones.

Some Russian media outlets reported that the explosion was caused by gunpowder catching fire.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, spoke on the phone with Donald Trump and European partners on Saturday morning after the meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska, the Élysée office said in a statement on Saturday.

The phone conversation lasted for one hour and other there were seven other European leaders present, including Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Friedrich Merz, Keir Starmer, Giorgia Meloni, Alexander Stubb and Karol Nawrocki, as well as the secretary general of Nato, Mark Rutte, the statement said.

We are yet to hear from Sir Keir Starmer’s government, but other European politicians have been reacting.

Italy’s deputy PM, Matteo Salvini said: “Every step forward towards peace, like this one, is good news. As Pope Leo said, may diplomacy speak again in place of weapons, without anyone obstructing it.”

The Norwegian foreign minister, Espen Barth Eide, said: “President Putin of Russia reiterated known arguments, such as emphasising the so-called ‘root causes’ of the war, which is code for the Russian justification for the illegal invasion of Ukraine.” He added it was important to keep pressure on Russia and listen to Ukraine’s wishes and needs.

The Czech foreign minister Jan Lipavský said he was “glad that President Trump is trying to stop the war” but that there has been “propagandistic nonsense about the ‘roots of the conflict’” from Putin in the subsequent press conference.

“The problem is Russian imperialism, not Ukraine’s desire to live freely,” he continued. “If Putin were serious about negotiating peace, he would not have been attacking Ukraine all day today.”

Lithuania’s defence minister, Dovilė Šakalienė, accused Putin of making “some more gaslighting and veiled threats” towards Ukraine and Europe in the press conference, in which the Russian leader said he hoped the countries “will not try to sabotage the talks”.

Hungary’s PM, Viktor Orbán, wrote on Facebook: “For years, we have watched the two largest nuclear powers eliminate the framework of their cooperation and send messages to each other.” He added “It’s over now. The world is a safer place today than it was yesterday.”

President Trump told Zelenskyy and Nato leaders that Putin doesn’t want a ceasefire and prefers a comprehensive agreement to end the war, the Axios reporter Barak Ravid posted on X. The post added that Trump has said: “I think a fast peace deal is better than a ceasefire.”

Russia’s initial reaction to the Donald Trump-Vladimir Putin summit has been decisively positive, with Moscow highlighting that the Russian leader met his US counterpart without making concessions and now faces no sanctions despite rejecting Trump’s ceasefire demands.

“The meeting proved that negotiations are possible without preconditions and simultaneously with the continuation of the ‘special military operation’,” wrote the former president Dmitry Medvedev on Telegram, using Russia’s preferred term for its invasion of Ukraine.

Medvedev, now the deputy chair of Russia’s security council, welcomed the fact that Putin was able to “personally and in detail present” Russia’s maximalist conditions for ending the war. In Alaska, Putin repeated his familiar line that the “root causes” of the conflict must be addressed – demands that in practice would severely limit Ukraine’s sovereignty.

He also picked up on Trump’s remarks that the pressure now lies with Kyiv, indirectly referring to the US president’s blunt message that Zelenskyy “gotta make a deal”.

“Both sides directly placed responsibility for achieving future results in negotiations on ending military actions on Kyiv and Europe,” Medvedev wrote.

Russian state media and the Kremlin elite were already in high spirits as Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin, who is wanted by The Hague for war crimes.

“Western media are on the verge of completely losing it,” wrote the foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova as Putin landed in Alaska.

“For three years they told everyone Russia was isolated and today they saw a beautiful red carpet laid out for the Russian president in the US,” she added.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has confirmed that he plans to meet Trump in Washington on Monday after Trumps’s summit with Putin.

“Ukraine reaffirms its readiness to work with maximum effort to achieve peace,” Zelenskyy said on X on Saturday.

“We support President Trump’s proposal for a trilateral meeting between Ukraine, the USA, and Russia. Ukraine emphasises that key issues can be discussed at the level of leaders, and a trilateral format is suitable for this,” he added.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is planning to meet Donald Trump in Washington as soon as Monday, the Axios reporter Barak Ravid said on X on Saturday.

Zelenskyy has said that his call with Trump lasted more than an hour and a half, and that Ukraine supports trilateral meetings. He added that Europe should be part of these talks at all stages.

The Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov says there was no discussion of a three-way summit between the Russian, US and Ukrainian presidents, the Russian state news agency Tass reported.

After the meeting, Trump had told reporters it was now up to Zelenskyy to “get it done” and that a meeting would be set up between the Ukrainian president and Putin, which Trump might attend.

Ushakov said he did not know yet when Putin and Trump would meet again after Friday’s summit in Alaska.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has told reporters that Trump had a “lengthy” call with Ukrainian president Zelenskyy on the plane back to DC, and is now on the phone to Nato leaders, according to wire agencies and reporters in the White House pool.

There are no further details just yet.

We will continue to gather reaction and try to make sense of what happened in Anchorage, Alaska on Friday. In the meantime, here are some of the day’s developments so far:

• Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met on a red carpet laid down for them at a US military base in the former Russian territory of Alaska, and spent about three hours in private talks, with top foreign policy aides, aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian observers were horrified that Trump laid out a red carpet for Putin, and even applauded him.

• The meeting, billed as a summit, came to an end much earlier than scheduled, after the first of what was supposed to have been two rounds of talks.

• Reporters were summoned for what was billed as a joint news conference, but were instead treated to a pair of brief statements that lasted, in total, 12 minutes. After Putin claimed that some sort of agreement had been reached, Trump said that there had been ‘no deal’ and then abruptly ended the event, taking no questions.

• A Fox News reporter called it “really stunning” that Putin spoke first in the event.

• In a post-summit interview with his supporter Sean Hannity, Trump said that the meeting with Putin had been “a 10” and suggested that Putin “spoke very sincerely” about his desire to end the war in Ukraine.

• Trump also claimed to Hannity that Putin, the Russian autocrat who has jailed, exiled and killed political rivals who could challenge him in elections, told him that the 2020 US presidential election “was rigged” and “you can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting.’”

Eleven months ago, during a presidential debate, Kamala Harris scoffed at Donald Trump’s claim that he would be able to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, based on his relationship with Vladimir Putin.

After Trump claimed that he would get the war ended even before taking office, as president-elect, Harris shot back.

“I believe the reason that Donald Trump says that this war would be over within 24 hours is because he would just give it up,” Harris said. “You would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch”.

In the end, when Trump did meet Putin as president on Friday, seven months into his second term, their discussion of ending the war went so badly that even the planned working lunch with the leaders and their aides was canceled.

That meant that the Russians went home without tasting the filet mignon the president had planned to serve them, in sharp contrast to the last summit between the two presidents, in Helsinki in 2018, when lunch was served.

A photograph of that 2018 lunch, taken by the New York Times photographer Doug Mills, is also a reminder of how different the make-up of Trump’s delegation was then.

In 2018, Trump sat down to lunch with Putin flanked by: John Kelly, his chief of staff; Fiona Hill, his Russia adviser; Mike Pompeo, his secretary of state; Jon Huntsman, his ambassador to Russia; and John Bolton, his national security adviser. Every one of those former aides subsequently left Trump’s inner circle and openly denounced him.

By contrast, Putin was joined at the 2018 lunch by: his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov; his foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov; and his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. All of them were at his side in Alaska on Friday.

Donald Trump claimed in an interview with Sean Hannity on Friday that Vladimir Putin, the Russian autocrat who has jailed, exiled and killed political rivals who could challenge him in elections, told him at their summit meeting that the 2020 US presidential election “was rigged” through the widespread use of postal voting that year.

“Vladimir Putin said something, one of the most interesting things, he said, ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting,’” Trump said. “He said, ‘No country has mail-in voting. It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.’”

“We talked about 2020, he said: ‘You won that election by so much,’” Trump added.

A short time later, after making the false claim that California’s system of sending ballots to voters opened the door to fraud, Trump said: “Vladimir Putin, smart guy, said ‘You can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting.’”

There is no evidence that voter fraud played any role in Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, but elections in Putin’s Russia are notoriously dishonest, with rampant cheating by the authorities documented by pro-democracy activists.

It is impossible to know if Putin did make these remarks, but Trump has a habit of putting his own words in the mouths of other people.

In the interview, he also claimed that Putin told him that the US was “dead” under his predecessor, Joe Biden, and was now “as hot as a pistol”.

Trump went on to repeat his claim that “the king of Saudi Arabia” told him the exact same thing in May, when he visited the country. But Trump did not meet the elderly king of Saudi Arabia during his visit.

Asked by Sean Hannity what advice he would give to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy after meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, Donald Trump said he would tell him to “make a deal”, to end the war.

He made no reference to any way in which Ukraine could make a deal with Russia while under occupation and bombardment.

Trump also repeated his familiar lie, debunked by the Guardian six months ago, that the US had given $350bn to Ukraine for its defense, while Europe had given just $100bn.

In an interview with Sean Hannity, recorded in the room where he just failed to convince Vladimir Putin to stop attacking Ukraine, Donald Trump just boasted that he has a special talent for ending wars.

“Wars are very bad, I seem to have an ability to end them,” Trump said.

The president was responding to a comment from Hannity, who praised Trump for playing a role in tamping down a series of largely dormant global conflicts in the past six months. Neither man mentioned that Trump had promised on the campaign trail that he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours if elected.

Donald Trump’s post-summit interview with Sean Hannity is being broadcast now on Fox.

Trump began by repeating his claim that he “always had a great relationship with President Putin”, but cooperation between the United States and Russia was made impossible by the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which he refers to as a “hoax”.

He then said that he did have a chance to speak privately to Putin, after their brief, 12-minute news conference. Putin “spoke very sincerely”, Trump said about his desire to end the war in Ukraine. Trump did not mention that the war began with Putin’s decision to seize Ukrainian territory in 2014, after his ally was deposed as president of Ukraine in a popular uprising. It then intensified in 2022 when Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Asked by Hannity to rate the meeting on a scale of one to 10, Trump replied that it was “a 10” because it showed that the leaders of the two nuclear-armed nations could cooperate.

“It’s good when two big powers get along,” Trump said.

Hannity then pressed Trump to reveal what Putin told him about why he thought the war in Ukraine would not have started if Trump was president. Trump demurred, but said that he could say in his own words that the reason was that Biden was grossly incompetent.

At the end of Donald Trump’s brief and somewhat defeated-sounding remarks after his meeting with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president extended an invitation to his US counterpart to hold the next round of talks in the Russian capital.

“Again, Mr President, I’d like to thank you very much, and we’ll speak to you very soon and probably see you again very soon,” Trump said. “Thank you very much, Vladimir.”

“Next time in Moscow,” Putin replied, chuckling.

“Oh, that’s an interesting one,” Trump said. “I’ll get a little heat on that one, but I, uh, I could see it possibly happening.”

On his way to Alaska, Donald Trump told Fox News anchor Bret Baier that his goal for the talks with Vladimir Putin was to get the Russian president to agree to a ceasefire.

“So when you talk about deals, it’s all I do my whole life, I do deals, you never know, you don’t like to have too many expectations,” Trump told Baier in an interview recorded on Air Force One that was broadcast on Friday.

“But we’re going to go and find out. I’d like to see a ceasefire. I wouldn’t be thrilled if I didn’t get it, but everyone says, ‘You’re not going to get the ceasefire, it’ll take place on the second meeting’, but I’m not going to be happy with that.

“I won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of a ceasefire.”

The White House pool reporter tells us that Donald Trump “is currently doing a previously announced interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News”.

That interview, with an opinion host who is a strong supporter of the president and has campaigned for him, is scheduled to be broadcast on Hannity’s show in just over an hour.

The interview was billed by the network as an exclusive look behind the scenes at what was supposed to have been a meeting of historic importance, perhaps comparable to Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China to meet chairman Mao Zedong. At the very least, Trump said that he hoped to convince the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to agree to an immediate ceasefire in his war on Ukraine.

Now that Trump’s talks with Putin have failed to bring the war in Ukraine to an end, a conflict that he promised on the campaign trail he could end in 24 hours, his discussion with Hannity will no doubt be a good deal less celebratory.

Among those scrambling to make sense of the 12-minute news conference, at which no questions were taken before Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin departed, are Fox News producers and correspondents who had hyped this meeting between the presidents of the United States and Russia as a summit of historic proportions, and one at which they would have exclusive access.

The network planned to broadcast an exclusive preview of the summit, recorded with Trump en route to Alaska on Air Force One, as the talks went on, to be followed by a second exclusive interview with the president, conducted by Sean Hannity immediately after the talks, to be broadcast during his 9pm show on Fox.

Those carefully laid plans were thrown into chaos by the briefness of both the talk and the news conference.

Jacqui Heinrich, a Fox White House correspondent, just noted in a live report from the conference room that what unfolded was very different from what Trump administration officials told reporters to expect. The idea, Heinrich said, was that there would be a news conference with the two leaders, and the opportunity to question them, if the talks went well, but if the talks did not go well, only Trump would appear and Putin would be sent packing.

“Neither of those things happened,” Heinrich noted. “And what was really stunning to me, as someone who has been in a lot of these press conferences, is there were a few things that were very unusual. You had Putin come out and address the press first. We are on US soil here.”

“The way that it felt in the room was not good,” Heinrich also said. “It did not seem like things went well. And it seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left.”

As Heinrich tried to make sense of what had taken place, the corner of the screen on Fox promoted Trump’s interview with Hannity, which is still scheduled to air at 9pm ET.

Putin also dominated the joint appearance in terms of speaking time. While the Russian leader spoke for about 8 minutes and 30 seconds, the US president was done in just under 3 minutes and 30 seconds.

That was quick. Donald Trump left more questions than answers as he fawned over Vladimir Putin but gave precious few details about their high-stakes summit.

“I believe we had a very productive meeting,” he said. “There were many, many points that we agreed on … There’s no deal until there’s a deal. I will call up Nato … I’ll of course call up President Zelenskyy and tell him about today’s meeting … We really made some great progress.”

He added: “I’ve always had a fantastic relationship with President Putin – with Vladimir … We were interfered with by the ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ hoax.”

Trump warmly thanked Putin, who invited him to Moscow, and dozens of reporters shouted questions but in vain. The US president, who can typically never resist talking and talking, left the stage without answering any of them.

Donald Trump ended his brief remarks at the joint news conference by thanking Vladimir Putin, and saying that they would speak again soon.

“Next time in Moscow,” Putin replied in English.

Trump then called the news conference to an end without taking any questions from the assembled reporters, or offering any details of what Putin called the agreement they had reached in their three hours of talks.

Donald Trump just began his very brief remarks by saying that the talks with Putin were “extremely productive” but more needs to be done to resolve the conflict in Ukraine.

“I believe we had a very productive meeting. There were many, many points that we agreed on,” Trump said. “There’s no deal until there’s a deal. I will call up Nato … I’ll of course call up President Zelensky and tell him about today’s meeting.”

“We really made some great progress,” Trump said without revealing any details of what that progress was.

“I’m going to start making a few phone calls and tell them what happened, but we had an extremely productive meeting and many points were agreed to,” Trump said. “There are just a very few that are left. Some are not that significant, one is probably the most significant. But we have a very good chance of getting there, we didn’t get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there.”

Putin says that he has reached an agreement with Trump and hopes that leaders in Kyiv “won’t throw a wrench” into the process of bring the war to an end. He offers no details on what the agreement is.

He also repeated his frequent demand that the root causes of the conflict need to be addressed. In the past, Putin has suggested that those causes include the elected government of Ukraine, which he has falsely claimed is led by Nazis.

Putin notes that Trump has claimed that the full-scale war that began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 would not have happened had Trump been the US president. Putin says that he agrees.

Vladimir Putin is speaking first at the joint news conference in Alaska after his talks with Donald Trump wrapped up ahead of schedule.

Putin said the talks were constructive before moving on to discuss the former Russian control of Alaska, noting the hundreds of Russian names of towns and numerous Russian Orthodox churches in the state.

The Russian leader’s emphasis on the historical Russian “heritage” of the US state will not be comforting to Ukrainian listeners, given Putin’s claim that the entire country, which was once part of the Russian empire, should be considered part of the “Russian world”.

“We have always considered the Ukrainian nation a brotherly nation,” Putin says.

Donald Trump’s talks with Vladimir Putin on the war in Ukraine have concluded earlier than expected and a joint news conference with the two presidents is about to begin at a US military base in Anchorage, Alaska. We have live video from the room, and will bring you updates on their remarks here on the blog.

The Russian foreign ministry reports on social media that the first round of talks between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are over. Video posted on X by the ministry shows Putin walking away from the room and talking to his press secretary, Dmitry Peskov.

The ministry says a joint news conference is expected to begin soon.

The unexpectedly short talks have prompted speculation that the meeting did not go well. In advance of the summit, Trump did say: “I’ll know within the first two minutes, three minutes, four minutes or five minutes. We tend to find out whether or not we’re going to have a good meeting or a bad meeting, and if it’s a bad meeting, it’ll end very quickly”.

As our colleague David Smith reported from Anchorage earlier, Donald Trump applauded Vladimir Putin, several times, when the two men met on a red carpet at the US airbase where they are now meeting in private with their top foreign policy advisers.

The Kremlin Press Office quickly distributed a photograph of the US president clapping for “his Russian counterpart” to news agencies.

The fact that the US president clapped for the Russian president and indicted war criminal, prompted the Russia-born cold war historian Sergey Radchenko to post a mind-blown emoji on X. “I argued in my book how the Russians crave nothing quite as much as recognition by the U.S.” he added. “Well, there we have it. There it is.”

Trump’s three rounds of applause were captured on a live stream on the White House YouTube channel. But, a few minutes later, when the White House posted video of the greeting on social media, the clip was edited to begin a split-second after Trump finished his third round of applause for Putin.

The video posted on the official White House Instagram and X accounts shows that Trump’s left arm is still swinging by his side as the clip begins. A look at the original live stream reveals that his arm had just dropped to his side at that point, after being raised in front of the president to clap for the Russian leader wanted by the International Criminal Court for the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.

As Donald Trump hosts Vladimir Putin for talks in Alaska aimed at ending the Russian war on Ukraine, some Ukrainians watching from afar have noticed that the US literally rolled out a red carpet for the Russian president, who is an indicted war criminal charged with kidnapping Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied regions of their country.

Mustafa Nayyem, a Ukrainian journalist turned politician, posted an image of US soldiers kneeling to secure the red carpet laid at the foot of Putin’s plane before the Russian president emerged with the caption: “Make Kneeling Great Again”.

Nayyem, who helped organize the 2013 protest movement on Maidan, Kyiv’s Independence Square, that toppled Putin’s ally Viktor Yanukovych, was not alone.

Olga Rudenko, the editor of the Kyiv Independent, shared the same image with the caption: “This is Putin’s new phone wallpaper. American soldiers kneeling under the big letters reading RUSSIA. To fix the red carpet. For a war criminal.” The Russian presidential jet is emblazoned with the word RUSSIA, written in Cyrillic letters.

A Ukrainian soldier, Oleksandr Solonko, wrote: “I feel very sorry for the American military who were forced to roll out the red carpet for the greatest war criminal whose propaganda system has been smearing their country for many years.”

The symbolism did not go unnoticed in Russia. Video of the US troops kneeling on the carpet beneath Putin’s plane was posted on Telegram by the Russian news channel Zvezda, or Star, which is owned by the Russian defense ministry. That clip was later shared on X by a German who supports Ukraine and compared Putin to Hitler.

“Western media are on the verge of completely losing it”, Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, observed on social media. “They spent three years telling everyone Russia was isolated, and today they saw the beautiful red carpet laid out for the Russian president in the US”.

As Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin began their summit in Alaska centered on ending Russia’s war on Ukraine, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, delivered an update on the fighting in a social media address from Kyiv.

“On the day of negotiations, the Russians are killing as well. And that speaks volumes,” Zelenskyy wrote in a post on X accompanying his video update.

He ran through a list of Russian targets. “Sumy – a Russian strike on the central market. Dnipro region – strikes on cities and enterprises. Zaporizhzhia, Kherson region, Donetsk region – deliberate Russian strikes. The war continues, and it is precisely because there is neither an order nor even a signal that Moscow is preparing to end this war,” Ukraine’s president said.

“Russia must end the war that it itself started and has been dragging out for years,” he added. “The killings must stop. A meeting of leaders is needed – at the very least, Ukraine, America, and the Russian side – and it is precisely in such a format that effective decisions are possible. Security guarantees are needed. Lasting peace is needed.”

The summit between the two leaders and their respective cabinet officials began at 11.32am local time.

We’re getting some pictures of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, joined by their respective delegations in a room ahead of their meeting. Behind the leaders is a blue backdrop that had the words “pursuing peace” printed on it.

The White House press pool, who are travelling with the president, say that Trump and Putin were sat in place by 11.26am local time, and the press were ushered out of the room by 11.27am.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin de-boarded their respective aircrafts, shook hands, and stood on a stage with “ALASKA 2025” emblazoned on the front, as the world’s press captured the moment.

Russian state media is reporting that Vladimir Putin will be joined by his foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and advisor Yuri Ushakov for his meeting with Donald Trump. It will now be a three-on-three summit, as the US president will be joined by secretary of state Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has landed in Anchorage, according to Russian state media.

The city of Zaporizhzhia, an industrial hub in south-east Ukraine, is as good a place as any to grasp the stakes of freezing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine along its current frontlines, or of implementing a “land swap for peace” deal as envisioned by Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.

Since Russian troops began rolling into Ukraine in February 2022, Zaporizhzhia, with its broad avenues and Stalin-era apartment blocks, has been a 30-minute drive from the frontline. It has been under near-constant attack from missiles and drones. On Sunday, a Russian guided air bomb hit a bus station, wounding 24 people – just another day of suffering in a city that has known many of them.

Plenty of people here and in other Ukrainian towns close to the frontline are so weary of the sleepless nights and disrupted lives of the past years that they are ready for Kyiv to sign a peace deal, even an imperfect one, if it means the attacks will stop.

But many others have a very different opinion because they know first-hand what it means to give Russia control over Ukrainian territory: arrests, disappearances and the erasure of anything Ukrainian. As Moscow moves swiftly to Russify occupied territory, expelling or arresting active members of society and introducing new media outlets and school curricula heavy on propaganda, a few years of Russian control may make it almost impossible for Ukraine to regain these territories at a later date.

About one in five people living in Zaporizhzhia are internally displaced, from places even closer to the frontline or from occupied parts of Ukraine. They are living in Zaporizhzhia until they are able to go home.

Read more about the grim reality of ‘land swaps’, and what it would mean for people in Zaporizhzhia.

The previously planned sit-down between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will now include the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and special envoy Steve Witkoff, according to the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt.

Air Force One has touched down at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson ahead of Donald Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin.

Greetings from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, a cold war-era military installation on the outskirts of Anchorage, that will play host to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin today.

I am among an estimated 700 journalists from all over the world. We were greeted at Anchorage international airport by the sight of a majestic brown bear slain by Governor Mike Dunleavy and displayed as a trophy in a glass case.

The media gathered downtown at 5.30am local time today and were bused to the air force base under a big sky with picturesque mountains. The airbase is like a small city with housing, children’s playgrounds, nondescript three-storey lodgings, a church with stained glass windows and great grassy expanses. The temperature is a crisp 50F.

The Reuters news agency reported: “The Kremlin press pool was housed in an Alaska Airlines Center, where a semi-open-plan room was subdivided by partitions and some reporters were seen making their own camp-style beds. They were fed for free at a nearby university campus, Russian reporters said.”

Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson was crucial to countering the Soviet Union during the cold war. It continues to play a role today, as planes from the base still intercept Russian aircraft that regularly fly into US airspace. Putin’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, arrived in a sweatshirt with “CCCP” – the Russian letters for USSR – across the front.

Today’s meeting could prove a win-win for the two leaders. Putin, an alleged war criminal who had been an international pariah, gets to meet the US president on American soil. Trump, for his part, gets to play global statesman in a massive media spectacle where no one is talking about Jeffrey Epstein.

The plane transporting Russian government officials has landed in Anchorage, Alaska, according to Flightradar24.

Welcome to our coverage of the US president’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska. This will be the first meeting with the Kremlin leader of Trump’s second term in office – and his seventh in total.

I’m Shrai Popat, and I’ll be bringing you the latest – alongside my colleagues – from today’s event.

The summit is set to kick off in just over an hour (3pm ET), at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. To get you up to speed, this is where things stand at the moment:

• Donald Trump has said, repeatedly, over the last few days that his chief aim of today’s meeting is to get a trilateral summit between Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and himself on the books. In his own words, Trump wants this to happen “almost immediately”. He’s also convinced that he’ll be able to tell from the first few minutes of his meeting today whether it will be a success, and would be prepared to walk away “real fast” if he thinks it’s not going well, according to an interview with Fox News.

• Crucially, the president has said he’s not in Alaska to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine, but instead with the goal of “getting Putin to the table”.

• However, Trump has been less clear on what would constitute a success from his sit-down with the Kremlin leader today. Earlier, on Air Force One, the president told reporters that he wants to see a ceasefire “rapidly”. He added: “I don’t know if it’s going to be today, but I’m not going to be happy if it’s not today.”

• The president also repeated his stern words from earlier in the week that Russia could expect “severe consequences” if it fails to show willingness to end the war in Ukraine. “Economically severe. It will be very severe. I’m not doing this for my health, OK, I don’t need it. I’d like to focus on our country, but I’m doing this to save a lot of lives,” the president said.

• For Zelenskyy’s part, he said that Ukraine is “counting on America”. He’s been shut out of talks today, but reiterated his call for “an honest end to the war”, and said he hoped to see “a strong American position” during today’s talks in Alaska.

• When it comes to territory negotiations, Trump has said he’s not interested in deciding on those today without Ukraine present, and Zelenskyy has said categorically that Ukraine could not agree to a ceasefire deal which cedes territory, as Moscow could use this as a springboard to start a future war.

• Trump confirmed to Zelenskyy that he’ll be calling him first after today’s meeting wraps, and he’s set to brief European leaders after that debrief.

• Ahead of the today’s summit, the president posted on Truth Social that he had a “wonderful” call with the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, saying “the purpose of the call was to thank him for the release of 16 prisoners”, with 1,300 under discussion. The Belarussian leader is the country’s only president since it adopted its current constitution. Lukashenko has described himself as Europe’s “last and only dictator”, and is a notable Russian ally.