White House says meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy before funeral of Pope Francis was ‘very productive’. What we know on day 1,158
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Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy met for a “very productive” meeting in Rome before the funeral of Pope Francis, the White House has said, a day after the US president said Russia and Ukraine were “very close to a deal” on ending the war. Ukraine confirmed the meeting but provided no details.
Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff met the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow on Friday to discuss Washington’s peace plan. The US president said after the three-hour meeting that it was a good day of talks and called for a high-level meeting between Kyiv and Moscow to close the deal. “Most of the major points are agreed to,” Trump said in the post on his Truth Social platform, without giving any details.
Trump made his comments despite the Ukrainian president’s repeated rejections of a proposal that Kyiv cede Crimea to Russia. Trump said in an interview with Time published on Friday that Crimea – which Russia annexed in 2014 – “will stay with Russia”. Washington has not revealed details of its peace plan but has suggested freezing the frontline and accepting Russian control of Crimea in exchange for peace.
An American man identified as the son of a deputy director of the CIA was killed in eastern Ukraine in 2024 while fighting under contract for the Russian military, according to an investigation by independent Russian media.
The Kremlin has blamed Ukraine for a car bomb that killed a senior Russian general near Moscow on Friday, hours before the Witkoff-Putin meeting. Kyiv has not commented on the blast that killed Yaroslav Moskalik, the latest in a series of Russian military officers and pro-war figures to be killed during the war. “There are reasons to believe that Ukraine’s special services were involved in the murder,” Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said, without providing any evidence.
Zelenskyy said he might miss Pope Francis’s funeral on Saturday, which Trump is attending, due to important “military meetings”. The Ukrainian leader had earlier said he would attend the Vatican funeral, where he wanted to meet Trump. “If I am not [there] in time, Ukraine will be represented at a proper level,” Zelenskyy said as he visited the site of a Russian strike on Kyiv on Thursday that killed 12 people and wounded at least 90.
Ukraine has detained a foreign vessel in its territorial waters that it alleges was involved in the illegal trade of stolen Ukrainian grain, the SBU state security service said on Friday. “The investigation found that the arrested vessel was part of Russia’s ‘shadow’ fleet, which the Kremlin uses to sell looted Ukrainian grain to third countries,” it said on Telegram. Kyiv has accused Russia of trading stolen Ukrainian grain since the 2022 war began – allegations Russia denies – but ship seizures have been rare.
Two civilians were killed and one critically injured after a Ukrainian drone attack on a car in Russia’s Belgorod region on Friday, local governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said.
Russia’s security services said on Friday they had arrested a Romanian citizen on suspicion of spying on military sites for Ukraine. The FSB security agency alleged the suspect had “collected and transmitted information about the locations of air defence systems in the city of Sochi”. Romania’s foreign ministry said the Romanian citizen was initially detained in the Abkhazia region four months ago and subsequently transferred to Sochi.
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