US envoy Steve Witkoff met Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg on Friday, as Donald Trump urged the Russian president to "get moving" on a ceasefire in Ukraine.The Kremlin said the meeting lasted for more than four hours and focused on "aspects of a Ukrainian settlement". The meeting, Witkoff's third with Putin this year, was described by special envoy Kirill Dmitriev as "productive".Trump, the US president, has expressed frustration over the progress of talks.
It comes as Trump's Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg denied suggesting the country could be partitioned.The Times earlier reported that, during an interview with the paper, Kellogg had proposed British and French troops could adopt zones of control in the west of Ukraine as part of a "reassurance force".Russia's army, he reportedly suggested, could then remain in the occupied east.He could almost make it look like what happened with Berlin after World War Two.
Kellogg later took to social media to say that the article had "misrepresented.''Ahead of the Putin-Witkoff talks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there was "no need to expect breakthroughs" as the "process of normalising relations is ongoing.Asked whether discussions could include setting up a date for Putin and Trump to meet.Beforehand, Witkoff had a meeting with Dmitriev at the Grand Hotel Europe in St Petersburg, where a conference was held on stainless steel and the Russian market.
Dmitriev, the 49-year-old head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund, visited Washington last week, becoming the most senior Russian official to go to the US since the country's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.Meanwhile, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky accused the Kremlin of prolonging the war during a visit on Friday to the site of a 4 April Russian missile attack on his home town of Kryvyi Rih.The attack killed 19 people, including nine children.He also alleged that "at least several hundred" Chinese nationals were fighting with the Russian army, after Ukraine said it had captured two Chinese nationals.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko later told the state-owned news agency Tass that "nothing could be farther from the truth".Zelensky laid flowers in front of photos of Herman Tripolets, nine, and seven-year-olds Arina Samodina and Radyslav Yatsko.He later reiterated a call for air defence systems "to protect lives and our cities".
Trump has previously claimed he could end the Ukraine-Russia conflict "in 24 hours". On Friday, he declared that it would not have happened at all if he had been in the White House when the war started.In February, US and Russian officials met in Saudi Arabia for their first face-to-face talks since the invasion. Officials have also been meeting to discuss restoring full diplomatic relations.
The US attempted to broker a limited ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia in the Black Sea, only for it to stall when the Kremlin asked for sanctions imposed after it launched its full-scale invasion of its neighbour to be lifted.Trump has since said he is "very angry" with Putin over the lack of progress in agreeing a truce between Kyiv and Moscow.
Trump has also had a fractious relationship with Zelensky since his second term as US president began, culminating in an angry confrontation in the Oval Office in February.Ksenia Karelina, a Russian-American, was sentenced to 12 years in jail in Russia for donating $51 to a Ukrainian charity when the war began in February 2022.The Los Angeles resident was freed on Thursday morning and exchanged for Arthur Petrov, a dual German-Russian citizen arrested in Cyprus in 2023.He was accused of illegally exporting microelectronics to Russia for manufacturers working with the military.
Madina Mammadova\\EDnews
