Ukraine brings back 84 POWs from Russia, Zelenskiy says
"Among the civilians released today are those who had been held by the Russians since 2014, 2016, and 2017," he wrote on X. "Among the military released today are the defenders of Mariupol."
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Sky News
34 minutes ago
- Sky News
Trump, Putin and no deal for Ukraine: The view from our correspondents
Why you can trust Sky News All eyes were on Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as they met for the first time in more than six years, the Russian president visiting the US for high-stakes talks that could reshape the war in Ukraine. The two leaders greeted each other with a handshake after stepping off their planes at the Elmendorf-Richardson military base in Anchorage, Alaska - and a smiling Trump even applauded Putin as he approached him on a red carpet that had been laid out. Trump-Putin summit - latest updates Following the talks, both leaders described the summit as productive but said no deal had been reached - and the word ceasefire was not mentioned by either. Here is the view from our correspondents on what the summit means for Ukraine, Putin and Trump. 3:02 'Putin spoke as if he was the host' Moscow correspondent Ivor Bennett, who travelled with the Russian delegation to Alaska, described the news conference as "one of the most unusual" he's attended, and also noted it must have been "the first and only time" Trump has not taken any questions from the press - probably because "Putin made that a condition" - something the Russian leader often does. Bennett also said that despite the Russians saying they expected the talks to last six or seven hours, it ended "much sooner" than that. "At this stage, we just don't know what's happened," he said. But what he found really interesting is that Putin spoke first in the news conference, "as if he were the host". "He said that he welcomed Donald Trump like a neighbour - again, kind of cementing this idea that he was the one in charge here, he was the one calling the shots." He also noted that while the slogan behind the two men read "pursuing peace", Putin appeared to actually be pursuing better bilateral relations with the US. And Putin's reference to the "root causes" of the Ukraine conflict is his "buzzword... that suggests that all of Russia's red lines still remain - that it doesn't want NATO to expand any further east, it wants Ukraine to agree to permanent neutrality". "So it doesn't look like Vladimir Putin has made any concessions, despite Donald Trump claiming that many points have been agreed upon." As for their initial red carpet meeting before the talks, he said it was a moment the Russian leader had craved - being welcomed on to US soil as an equal for a meeting of great powers. , reporting from the ground in Alaska, described the meeting on the tarmac as "extraordinary". 1:30 There was the red carpet and more for a man with blood on his hands, he writes. Putin - aggressor, pariah and wanted for war crimes. Quite the CV for a man who was applauded on to the airbase by his host, the US president. It couldn't have looked more cordial - a superpower moment with a smile and a shake between the men who hold peace in their hands. If that wasn't enough, there followed a military flypast to dress the spectacle. A smiling Putin seemed duly impressed, but what it says about the power dynamic in the relationship will trouble onlookers in Ukraine - and one moment they may have found particularly galling. Posing for photographs with Trump before waiting media, Putin was asked: "Will you stop killing civilians?" To which he smiled, and gave it a deaf ear. Our international affairs editor Dominic Waghorn, in Kyiv, gauged the Ukrainian reaction to Putin's arrival - and says people are furious at the red carpet welcome extended by the Trump team. Images of US soldiers on their knees, unfurling the red carpet at the steps of the Russian leader's plane, have been going viral, he reports. Social media has been lit up with fury, anger, and disgust, he says. There are different ways of welcoming a world leader to this type of event, and Trump has gone all out to give a huge welcome to Putin, which is sticking in the craw of Ukrainians.
The Independent
43 minutes ago
- The Independent
Trump hand-delivered Putin a letter from First Lady Melania on ‘plight of children in Ukraine and Russia': White House
President Donald Trump hand-delivered Russian President Vladimir Putin a letter from First Lady Melania Trump on the 'plight of children in Ukraine and Russia,' according to a new report that cites White House officials. Trump met with Putin for nearly three hours on Friday at a U.S. military base in Anchorage, Alaska. In their first meeting in six years the two leaders discussed the war in Ukraine. Trump has pushed for peace in the region but no ceasefire deal came out of the talks. Melania Trump, who was born in Slovenia, wrote Putin a letter that mentioned the abductions of children in the over three-year war, which Trump gave to Putin at the summit, two White House officials told Reuters. The Independent has reached out to the White House for comment. While the exact number of missing children remains unclear, the Institute for the Study of War reported in March Ukraine verified nearly 19,500 children have been deported by Russia. But the research non-profit said, 'The true figure is likely to be much higher because Russia frequently targets vulnerable children without anyone to speak for them.' In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin, accusing him of the war crimes of unlawfully deporting children and unlawfully transferring them from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the questions raised by the ICC 'outrageous and unacceptable,' Reuters reported at the time. He also mentioned Russia does not recognize the jurisdiction of the court, so 'any decisions of this kind are null and void' for the country. Prior to Friday's summit, Trump had spoken on the phone with Putin on several occasions, but it didn't seem to move the needle on the war in Ukraine. In recent months, Trump grew more frustrated with the Russian leader, as he continued his military campaign in Ukraine. Last month, Trump talked about Melania reminding him of the deadly toll of Russia's bombardments on Ukraine. 'I go home, I tell the first lady, 'I spoke to Vladimir today, we had a wonderful conversation.' And she says, 'Oh really, another city was just hit,' he said from the Oval Office. During a joint speech to reporters Friday, where neither leader took questions, Trump called his meeting with Putin 'very productive.'
Telegraph
44 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Trump has just discovered he isn't as powerful as he thought he was
On his way to Alaska to meet Vladimir Putin, president Trump told Fox News's Brett Baier that he wouldn't be happy if he left the summit without a ceasefire in Ukraine. 'Now, I say this, and I have said it from the beginning: This is really setting the table today,' Trump said. 'We're going to have another meeting, if things work out, which will be very soon, or we're not going to have any more meetings at all, maybe ever.' In short, Trump was well aware that anything could have happened in Alaska on Friday. In the event, after nearly three hours of talks, Trump and Putin stepped up to their lecterns touting unspecified progress and calling their discussions very productive. Putin, in his typical monotone, referred to the meeting with the US president as 'long overdue', cast blame on the Biden administration for allowing US-Russia relations to deteriorate, and credited Trump for at least being willing to meet face-to-face. Putin laid it on thick, going so far as to confirm Trump's repeated assertions that the war in Ukraine would never have happened if he had still been holding court in the White House in February 2022. Trump, a man who likes to hear himself talk, was noticeably subdued at the press conference and said very little. He consistently claimed progress on the major topics of discussion without telling us what those topics were. Ever the gracious host (unless your name is Volodymyr Zelensky), Trump returned Putin's flattery; the Russian leader, he commented, wanted peace in Ukraine as much as he did. Of course, there's very little evidence supporting that statement. When all was said and done, there was no peace deal in Ukraine. Nothing on the conflict was settled. The immediate ceasefire that Trump, Zelensky and the Europeans hoped to squeeze out of the Russian strongman was nowhere to be found. On the big items, the summit failed. But none of this should have been a surprise. Anybody who has been monitoring the three-and-a-half year war will tell you that neither Putin nor Zelensky is prepared to cede their maximum negotiating positions. The differences between Moscow and Kyiv remain unbridgeable at this point in time, so much so that many foreign policy analysts in the West were wondering why Trump even bothered to fly to Alaska in the first place. Zelensky wants a ceasefire before real negotiations begin; Putin wants to fight and talk simultaneously. Zelensky doesn't want to cede any Ukrainian territory that Russia doesn't already occupy, and he most certainly won't recognise Russia's territorial gains; Putin wants Ukrainian forces to lay down their arms, withdraw and gift the entire Donbas region, as well as Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, to him on a silver platter. Zelensky wants Western security guarantees; Putin doesn't want any Western involvement in Ukraine's future defence at all. The divergences go on and on, and a single high-level meeting, particularly one to which Zelensky wasn't invited, was never going to resolve them. As we await the readouts from the White House and anticipate what agreements, if any, were actually reached, Trump will be returning to Washington with mixed feelings. On the one hand, he can talk solace in the fact that his talks with Putin didn't break down, like the top-level diplomacy he instigated with North Korea's Kim Jong-un more than six years before. He may even be able to call this entire endeavour a win if further talks are scheduled in the future. Meanwhile, the nervous nellies in Europe will be relieved that Trump didn't negotiate swaths of Ukraine away to the Russians, a concern that nagged Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz to such an extent that an emergency summit with Trump was put in the calendar last Wednesday to talk him out of any moves he may have up his sleeve. Trump, however, is probably also a bit peeved by the outcome. Although the Trump administration tried to set the bar low, the president himself also outlined his expectations for the summit: a ceasefire and, if all goes well, another meeting, this time with Zelensky in the room. Instead, he's leaving Alaska without the first item on his list and the second still up in the air. The fighting will go on as fiercely tomorrow as it did today. The bottom line here is simple: Trump may aggrandise and boast about his remarkable dealmaking abilities, but on the war in Ukraine, he isn't the most important protagonist in the story. Trump can push, pressure, cajole and sweet-talk, but it's Zelensky and Putin who will determine when the killing stops. As the US intelligence community wrote in a threat assessment earlier this year, 'both leaders for now probably still see the risks of a longer war as less than those of an unsatisfying settlement.' Plenty has changed in the months since those words were published. But Trump's big attempt at peacemaking notwithstanding, that conclusion still holds true. Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities
