Russian president Vladimir Putin on Saturday said he discussed ways of ending the conflict in Ukraine ‘on a fair basis’ at his meeting with US president Donald Trump.
Speaking to top officials in Moscow a day after the talks in Alaska, Putin also said they had been ‘timely’ and ‘very useful’, according to images put out by the Kremlin.
‘We have not had direct negotiations of this kind at this level for a long time,’ he said, adding: ‘We had the opportunity to calmly and in detail reiterate our position.’
‘The conversation was very frank, substantive, and, in my opinion, brings us closer to the necessary decisions,’ he said.
Meanwhile, Russian forces said on the same day they had captured two more villages in eastern Ukraine while Kyiv said it was pushing back a rapid Russian advance that had pierced through its defences.
In Russia, Kursk region governor Alexander Khinshtein said a Ukrainian drone attack in the district of Rylsk had killed two people in their car—a 52-year-old man and his 13-year-old son.
The latest developments in the war came hours after US president Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin held talks on ending the conflict, with few visible results.
The Ukrainian army, smaller and less equipped than Russia’s, has been on the defensive for months as Russian forces advance slowly but steadily.
Russia’s defence ministry said its troops had taken the village of Kolodyazi in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region and the village of Vorone in the neighbouring Dnipropetrovsk region.
Kyiv and Ukrainian military analysts from the website Deepstate did not confirm the advances.
Russian troops earlier this week broke through Ukrainian lines in one part of the Donetsk region near the town of Dobropillia, close to an important road connecting key cities in the area.
Ukraine said it sent reinforcements and claimed Friday to have re-taken six villages.
‘For a second consecutive day we have been successful in extremely difficult sectors in the Dobropillia and Pokrovsk directions,’ Zelensky said on social media on Saturday.
‘The destruction of occupiers who tried to infiltrate deeper into our positions continues,’ he said, adding that Ukraine had also captured an ‘important’ number of Russian POWs.
Zelensky also repeated his warnings about possible further Russian attacks ‘in the coming days’.
‘The Russian army may try to increase pressure and strikes against Ukrainian positions in order to create more favourable political circumstances for talks with global actors,’ he said.
Russia has pushed into Ukrainian territory for almost 3.5 years, occupying large swathes of the east and south of the country.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, launched by Putin in February 2022, has killed thousands.
Russia launched 85 attack drones and a ballistic missile at Ukraine overnight, Kyiv said Saturday, hours after the Putin-Trump talks in Alaska.
The highly anticipated meeting in the remote US state ended with no breakthrough in halting Russia’s more than three-year-long Ukraine invasion.
Ukraine’s air force said Moscow had ‘attacked with an Iskander-M ballistic missile and 85 Shahed-type’ drones, while also attacking ‘frontline areas’ in four regions.
In its daily report, the air force said the attacks took place ‘on the night of August 16’ and starting in the evening of August 15 – when Putin and Trump held their negotiations.
Kyiv said its air defences shot down 61 of the drones.
Putin on February 24, 2022 ordered Russian troops into Ukraine in a massive all-out offensive which has killed thousands of people, destroyed cities and forced millions of people to flee their homes.
