US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the “killing needs to stop” as Russia and Ukraine held their first direct peace talks in three years.
Delegations from the two countries met in Istanbul, Turkey, for the meeting where there were reportedly no handshakes.
Hopes were low of any progress in ending the war as a Ukrainian delegation led by Defense Minister Rustem Umerov sat down with a low-level Russian team headed by presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, according to Kyiv sources.
Earlier, Donald Trump called for a summit with Putin “as soon as we can set it up” after the Russian president stayed away from the Ukraine peace talks in Turkey.
The US president pushed for a face-to-face meeting with Putin in a bid to break the deadlock over ending the war in Ukraine.
Trump stressed he would hold a meeting with Putin "as soon as we can set it up”.
On the fourth-day of a visit to the Middle East, he added: “It's time for us to just do it."
Expectations for a major breakthrough in Istanbul, already low, were dented further on Thursday when Trump said there would be no movement without a meeting between himself and Putin.
The Russian president on Sunday proposed direct talks with Ukraine in Turkey.
But he then rejected a challenge from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to meet him in person, and instead has sent a team of mid-ranking officials to the talks.
Mr Zelensky said Putin’s decision not to attend but to send what he called a “decorative” line-up showed the Russian leader was not serious about ending the war.
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy criticised the “low-level” delegation sent by Moscow.
Russia accused Ukraine of trying “to put on a show” around the talks.
Moscow says it sees them as a continuation of the negotiations that took place in the early weeks of the war in 2022, also in Istanbul.
But the terms under discussion then, when Ukraine was still reeling from Russia’s initial invasion, would be deeply disadvantageous to Kyiv.
They included a demand by Moscow for large cuts to the size of Ukraine’s military.
With Russian forces now in control of close to a fifth of Ukraine, having increasingly gained territory while suffering heavy losses, Putin has held fast to his longstanding demands for Kyiv to cede land abandon its NATO membership ambitions and become a neutral country.
Ukraine rejects these terms as tantamount to capitulation, and is seeking guarantees of its future security from world powers, especially the United States.
As Trump has pushed for peace, Putin’s military has unleashed a series of deadly attacks on Kyiv and other cities, prompting an angry plea from the US president for Russia to stop the bloodshed.
But if Putin continues his war, it is far from clear that Trump will beef up support for Ukraine or hit Russia with tougher sanctions.
