Putin meets Trump envoy as Ukraine peace deadline looms
Trump hailed the meeting as 'highly productive' and claimed 'great progress' was made, without elaborating.
'Everyone agrees this war must come to a close, and we will work towards that in the days and weeks to come,' Trump posted on his social media site.
The president didn't mention his deadline for Putin to start taking unspecified steps toward ending his war with Ukraine, raising obvious questions about whether the threat is still hanging over the Kremlin.
A Kremlin spokesman said the meeting lasted three hours and was 'useful and constructive.' The spokesman suggested Putin presented some kind of proposal for Witkoff to convey to Trump, but did not elaborate.
Trump last week set a stricter deadline of '10 or 12 days' for Putin to wind down the war against Ukraine or start peace negotiations and threatened 'severe tariffs' and other economic penalties against Russia and its economic partners if it refuses.
Moscow had so far shrugged off Trump's deadline as empty bluster, noting that he has given numerous previous ultimatums on various issues that turned out to be toothless threats.
Russia believes it has the upper hand on the battlefield, at least in the short and medium term, giving it little reason to agree to even a brief ceasefire.
Its troops have made modest advances along the long front line in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region and ousted Ukrainian troops from a sliver of a Russian border territory that they had previously seized.
Russia has also mounted increasingly deadly missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian civilian targets.
Earlier, Witkoff took an early morning stroll in Moscow with Kirill Dmitriev, the Russian president's envoy for investment and economic cooperation, which was captured in footage aired by a Russian news agency.
Dmitriev played a key role in three rounds of direct talks between delegations from Russia and Ukraine, as well as discussions between Russian and U.S. officials. The negotiations made no progress on ending the three-year war following Russia's invasion of its neighbor.
Trump has recently flip-flopped to a much harsher stance on Russia after seeing Putin spurn his demands for concessions for months.
But Trump has shown himself to be unwilling to take a firm stance of defending Ukraine and sticking to it, giving Putin an incentive to wait out any threats.
The new deadline and threat to impose 'secondary sanctions' on nations that buy Russian energy, like India, China and Turkey, are particularly problematic because those economic powerhouses have no control over Russia's stance on Ukraine.
They are unlikely to cut economic ties with Moscow in response to such U.S. demands, especially when Trump himself was cozying up to Putin just a few weeks ago.
The White House announced it is tacking on a new 25% tariff on products imported from India, raising the total tax to 50%, which suggests it doesn't consider Putin has met the deadline.
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