Putin | Pakistan

United States President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that if his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin goes well, he would like to have a quick second meeting between Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and himself. “If the first one goes okay, we’ll have a quick second one,” Trump told reporters. “I would like to do it almost immediately, and we’ll have a quick second meeting between President Putin and President Zelensky and myself, if they’d like to have me there.” Trump did not provide a timeframe for a second meeting. He is to meet Putin in Anchorage, Alaska on Friday. Trump also said Russia would face consequences if Putin did not agree to stop the war. “Yes, they will,” he said. He did not spell out the consequences, but he has warned of stiff economic sanctions if no breakthrough can be achieved. Trump spoke after holding talks via telephone with European leaders and Zelenskiy about his meeting with Putin. “We had a very good call. He was on the call. President Zelensky was on the ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to the leaders of China, India and three ex-Soviet states on Friday in a flurry of calls to brief them on his contacts with the United States about the war in Ukraine. Putin met US President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow on Wednesday, after which the Kremlin said a summit between Putin and Trump could take place as early as next week. No venue, date or agenda have been announced. Trump, pressing for an end to the 3.5-year war, had set a deadline that expires on Friday for Russia to agree to peace or face new sanctions on Moscow and countries that buy Russian exports. China and India are the biggest buyers of Russian oil. China’s President Xi Jinping told Putin in a phone call that China is pleased to see Russia and the US maintaining contact and improving ties to advance a political resolution of the Ukraine crisis, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said. China is a major backer of Russia in its confrontation with the West, as well as Russia’s biggest trading...

United States envoy Steve Witkoff held talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on Wednesday, two days before the expiry of a deadline set by US President Donald Trump for Russia to agree to peace in Ukraine or face new sanctions. Witkoff flew to Moscow on a last-minute mission to seek a breakthrough in the three-and-a-half-year war that began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Russian state TV showed a brief clip of him shaking hands with Putin at the start of their meeting. Russian news agencies said the talks ended after about three hours, and Witkoff’s motor convoy was seen leaving the Kremlin. Russian investment envoy Kirill Dmitriev, who earlier greeted Witkoff on arrival and strolled with him in a park near the Kremlin, posted on social media: “Dialogue will prevail.” There was no immediate statement from either side on the substance of the talks. Later, Trump called the meeting “highly productive” in a post on Truth Social. “Great progress was made!” the US president wrote. “...

Ukrainian drones targeted St Petersburg on Sunday, Russian authorities said, forcing the airport to close for five hours as Russian President Vladimir Putin marked the country’s Navy Day in the city, despite the earlier cancellation of its naval parade due to security concerns. St Petersburg usually holds a large-scale, televised navy parade on Navy Day, which features a flotilla of warships and military vessels sailing down the Neva River and is attended by Putin. Last year, Russia suspected a Ukrainian plan to attack the city’s parade, according to state television. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed on Sunday that this year’s parade had been cancelled for security reasons, following first reports of its cancellation in early July. Putin arrived at the city’s historic naval headquarters on Sunday by a patrol speed boat, from where he followed drills involving more than 150 vessels and 15,000 military personnel in the Pacific and Arctic Oceans and Baltic and Caspian Seas. “Today we are marking this ho...

President Vladimir Putin intends to keep fighting in Ukraine until the West engages on his terms for peace, unfazed by Donald Trump’s threats of tougher sanctions, and his territorial demands may widen as Russian forces advance, three sources close to the Kremlin said. Putin, who ordered Russian troops into Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting in the country’s east between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops, believes Russia’s economy and its military are strong enough to weather any additional Western measures, the sources said. Trump on Monday expressed frustration with Putin’s refusal to agree to a ceasefire and announced a wave of weapons supplies to Ukraine, including Patriot surface-to-air missile systems. He also threatened further sanctions on Russia unless a peace deal was reached within 50 days. The three Russian sources, familiar with top-level Kremlin thinking, said Putin will not stop the war under pressure from the West and believes Russia — which has survived the t...

Russian President Vladimir Putin told United States President Donald Trump in a phone call on Thursday that Moscow wants a negotiated end to the Ukraine war, but will not step back from its original goals, a Kremlin aide said. In a wide-ranging conversation that also covered Iran and the Middle East, Trump “again raised the issue of an early end to military action” in Ukraine, the aide, Yuri Ushakov, told reporters. “Vladimir Putin, for his part, noted that we continue to seek a political and negotiated solution to the conflict,” Ushakov said. Putin briefed Trump on the implementation of agreements reached between Russia and Ukraine last month to exchange prisoners-of-war and dead soldiers, Ushakov said, and told him that Moscow was ready to continue negotiations with Kyiv. “Our president also said that Russia will achieve the goals it has set: that is, the elimination of the well-known root causes that led to the current state of affairs, to the current acute confrontation, and Russia will not back down from...

ST PETERSBURG: Russian President Vladimir Putin quipped on Friday that in his view the whole of Ukraine was “ours” and cautioned that advancing Russian forces could take the Ukrainian city of Sumy as part of a bid to carve out a buffer zone along the border. Putin, who ordered troops into Ukraine in 2022 after eight years of fighting in the country’s east, also said he was not seeking the capitulation of Ukraine or denying its sovereignty, but that Ukraine had to be neutral. Russia currently controls about a fifth of Ukraine, including Crimea, more than 99 per cent of the Luhansk region, over 70pc of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and fragments of the Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions. Asked about fresh Russian advances, Putin told the St Petersburg International Economic Forum that he considered Russians and Ukrainians to be one people and “in that sense the whole of Ukraine is ours”. Kyiv and its Western allies say Moscow’s claims to four Ukrainian regions and Crimea are illegal, and ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that in his view the whole of Ukraine was “ours” and cautioned that advancing Russian forces could take the Ukrainian city of Sumy as part of a bid to carve out a buffer zone along the border. Ukraine’s foreign minister denounced the statements as evidence of Russian “disdain” […]

MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that special attention in the country’s new arms programme should be paid to the nuclear triad – land-based, sea-based and aircraft-launched weapons. Putin’s remarks, broadcast on state television, were made at a meeting of senior officials devoted to the country’s arms industry. “Undoubtedly, special attention should be […]

Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to “help resolve” the standoff between Iran and the United States over Tehran’s nuclear programme, the Kremlin said on Thursday. “We have a close partnership with Tehran. And President Putin said that he was ready to use this partnership to help resolve the Iranian nuclear issue,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. After a call between the leaders on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump said Putin had offered to “participate” in talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme, as Trump accused Iran of “slow-walking” its response to Washington’s offer of a deal. Washington and Tehran have held five rounds of talks since April to thrash out a new accord to replace the nuclear deal that Trump abandoned during his first term in 2018. Trump said on Monday that his administration would not allow “any” enrichment of uranium, despite Tehran’s insistence that it has the right under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said earlier...

US President Donald Trump said he spoke to Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Wednesday about Ukraine and Iran, warning that the Kremlin leader had “very strongly” pledged to respond to Kyiv’s stunning drone attack on Russian bombers. Trump said that there was no “immediate peace” on the horizon in Ukraine — which Russia invaded in 2022 — following what he described as a one-hour and 15-minute call with the Russian president. On Iran, Trump said that Putin had offered to “participate” in talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme, as Trump accused the Islamic republic of “slow walking” its response to Washington’s offer of a deal. The call came three days after Ukraine conducted a massive, daring drone attack against Russian military airbases, saying it had destroyed several Russian nuclear-capable bombers worth billions of dollars. Trump said that he and Putin had “discussed the attack on Russia’s docked airplanes, by Ukraine and also various other attacks that have been taking place by both sides”. “It was a go...

The Kremlin on Wednesday rebuffed a call by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a three-way summit with counterparts Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as Kyiv seeks to force Moscow to halt its more than three-year-long invasion. Moscow said any meeting involving Russian President Putin and Zelensky would only happen after “concrete agreements” had been struck between negotiators from each side. Putin rejected calls to meet Zelensky in Turkey earlier this month, when Russia and Ukraine held their first direct peace talks in three years. Putin has repeatedly said he does not see Zelensky as a legitimate leader and called for him to be toppled. US President Trump, meanwhile, has expressed frustration at both leaders for not yet striking a deal to end the war. The two sides have traded waves of massive aerial attacks in recent weeks, with Ukraine unleashing one of its largest-ever drone barrages on Russia overnight, according to the defence ministry in Moscow. “If Putin is not comfortable with a bilateral me...

US President Donald Trump said Vladimir Putin had “gone absolutely CRAZY” by unleashing the largest aerial attack of the war on Ukraine and said he was considering more sanctions on Moscow, but he also scolded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “Something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” Trump said of the Russian president on Truth Social. “I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia!” Trump also criticised Zelensky, posting that the Ukrainian leader “is doing his Country no favours by talking the way he does. Everything out of his mouth causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop.” Speaking to reporters at the airport in Morristown, New Jersey, Trump said of Putin: “I don’t know what’s wrong with him. What the hell happened to him? Right? He’s killing a lot of people. I’m not happy about that.” He raised the possibility of imposing more sanctions on Russia ...

President Vladimir Putin on Thursday sacked Russia’s chief of land forces, General Oleg Salyukov, the Kremlin said, in the latest removal of a high-profile military establishment figure amid the offensive on Ukraine. Salyukov, 70, will become a deputy to ex-defence minister Sergei Shoigu, who was removed from last year and made Secretary of the Security […]