Witkoff meets Putin as Trump urges Russia to ‘get moving’ on Ukraine ceasefire

American envoy Steve Witkoff met Vladimir Putin in Saint Petersburg on Friday, while Donald Trump urged the Russian president to “move” on a ceasefire in Ukraine.

The Kremlin said that the meeting had lasted more than four hours and focused on “the aspects of a Ukrainian colony”. The talks, the third of Witkoff with Putin this year, were described by the Special Envoy Kirill Dmitriev as “productive”.

Trump expressed his frustration with regard to Putin on the state of the talks. Friday, he wrote on social networks: “Russia must move. Too many people before [sic] Dying, thousands a week, in a terrible and insane war. “”

This occurs while Trump’s Ukrainian envoy Keith Kellogg denied having suggested that the country could be divided.

The Times said that during an interview with the newspaper, Kellogg had proposed that British and French troops could adopt control areas In the west of Ukraine as part of a “comfort force”.

The Russian army, he suggested, could then remain occupied. “You might almost be like what happened with Berlin after the Second World War,” said the newspaper.

Kellogg then went to social networks to say that the article had “distorted” what he said. “I was talking about a resilience force after the semester in support of Ukraine’s sovereignty,” he wrote on X, adding: “I was not referring to a partition of Ukraine.”

Neither the White House nor Kyiv immediately reacted to the comments. The BBC asked Times its answer.

Earlier Friday, European nations agreed 21 billion euros ($ 24 billion; 18 billion pounds sterling) Military aid for Kyiv.

During the event, the defense ministers in Europe said they saw no end of the war.

Before Putin-Witkoff’s talks, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that there was “no need to expect breakthroughs” because the “relationship standardization process was underway”.

When asked if the discussions could include the establishment of a date for Putin and Trump to meet, Peskov said: “Let’s see. It depends on what Witkoff came.”

Before, Witkoff had a meeting with Dmitriev at the Grand Hotel Europe in Saint Petersburg, where a conference took place on stainless steel and the Russian market.

Dmitryv, the 49-year-old chief of the sovereign heritage fund of Russia, went to Washington last week and was the highest Russian official to go to the United States since the large-scale invasion of the country of Ukraine in 2022.

Meanwhile, the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, accused the Kremlin of extending the war during a visit Friday on the site of a Russian missile attack on April 4 against his hometown of Kryvyi Rih. The attack killed 19 people, including nine children.

He also alleged that hundreds of Chinese nationals were fighting with the Russian army. This comes after Ukraine said that he had captured two Chinese nationals.

“We have information according to which at least several hundred Chinese nationals are fighting within the framework of the occupation forces of Russia,” said Zelensky.

“This means that Russia clearly tries to prolong the war even using Chinese lives.”

Zelensky posed flowers in front of photos of Herman Tripletles, nine and seven years old, Arina Samodina and Radyslav Yatsko.

He then reiterated a call for air defense systems “to protect lives and our cities”.

“We discussed it with President Trump-Ukraine is not only asking, we are ready to buy these additional systems,” he wrote on social networks.

“Only powerful weapons can really be invoked to protect life when you have a neighbor like Russia.”

Trump previously said he could end the Ukrainian-Russia conflict in 24 hours “. On Friday, he said that it would not have happened at all if he had been at the White House in 2022 when Russia launched his large -scale invasion.

“A war that should ld [sic] I never arrived, and would not have arrived, if I was president !!! “He wrote.

In February American and Russian officials met in Saudi Arabia For their first face -to -face talks since the invasion. Officials also gathered to discuss the restoration of complete diplomatic relations.

Trump also had a Fractual relationship with Zelensky Since his second mandate as an American president has started, culminating in an angry confrontation at the Oval Office in February.

The United States has attempted to negotiate a limited ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia in the Black Sea, only for it to hold where the Kremlin asked for sanctions imposed after launching its neighbor’s large-scale invasion.

Trump has since said that he was “very angry” and “angry” with Putin about the lack of progress by accepting a truce between Kyiv and Moscow.

Russian ambassador to the United Kingdom Andrei Kelin, told BBC Sunday with Laura Kuensberg that the United States is not its ally.

He said that America and Russia had not been able to go from “total distrust to alignment in two months” since Trump returned to the White House.

“We have too much disagreement,” he said. “But we are working on these disagreements step by step in different fields.”

Earlier this week, Washington and Moscow went forward with a exchange of prisoners.

Ksenia Karelina, a Russian-American, was sentenced to 12 years in prison in Russia for having made a donation of $ 51 to a Ukrainian charitable organization when the war began in February 2022.

The resident of Los Angeles was released Thursday morning and exchanged against Arthur Petrov, a double German-Russian citizen arrested in Cyprus in 2023.

He was accused of illegally exporting microelectronics to Russia for manufacturers working with the army.