Vladimir Putin has agreed to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to the Donald Trump administration
Vladimir Putin agrees to commence next phase of peace process
The Trump administration has said Russian leader Vladimir Putin has agreed to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as part of peace talks to end the war in Ukraine.
The development was confirmed by Donald Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who said “encouraging conversations” between Trump and Putin had led to the maligned Russian leader agreeing to “the next phase of the peace process”. Such a meeting could be followed by trilateral talks with Trump “if necessary”.
Ukraine has not yet repsonded, but Zelensky has previously said he is willing to meet with Putin.
Further details, such as where and when a meetin could take place, are not yet clear.
Trump had said earlier today that he had been working on arranging a meeting. “They haven’t been exactly best friends,” he said in an interview with Fox News. “It only matters if we get things done… I hope that President Zelensky will do what he has to do. He has to show some flexibility also.”
A face-to-face meeting between the pair could be a remarkable development and step towards ending a war that has raged on a massive scale since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In the time since, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates over 13,800 civliians have been killed, 726 of them children. Civilian detahs in Russian-occupied areas are hard to calculate.
According to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), over 1 million Russian troops have been killed or injured since the full-scale invasion.
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