Steve Witkoff meets President Putin in Moscow

“My son, Dmytro, died nine months ago defending Ukraine,” she said. “He was a former fireman. He was 31 when he died. Crimea will always be ours and we will never give it up.”

Like many Ukrainians, she warned that President Putin would target other countries, if he was allowed to win in Ukraine.

When asked what she thought of Trump, she sighed. “He wants all our resources, our power stations, everything.” It is hard to find anyone in Kyiv who doesn’t fear that Putin and Trump are seeking to carve up Ukraine among themselves.

“The Russians want to take our land and Trump wants our mineral wealth. What’s left for us?” said one man. “For us, this a lose-lose situation.”

President Putin is meeting now with Donald Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, his spokesman has said, as diplomacy over the Ukraine war intensifies.

“The president of Russia Vladimir Putin is receiving Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s envoy, at the Kremlin,” said Dmitry Peskov.

Witkoff’s cortege reportedly arrived at the Kremlin shortly before 2pm local time (noon BST).

Interfax said that he had met Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s envoy and negotiator to the West, who is CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund.

Witkoff arrived in the Russian capital this morning for his fourth meeting with Putin over the Ukraine crisis. He reportedly flew in to Vnukovo airport from Miami.

Witkoff is expected to raise a US demand that Russia recognise Ukraine’s right to maintain its own military and defence industry as part of a potential peace deal, Bloomberg reported today, citing people familiar with the ongoing negotiations.

President Trump’s comments that Crimea will “stay with Russia” have only added to a feeling in Ukraine that their country is being locked out of a potential deal that will seal their future for decades to come.

“The fate of Ukraine is behind decided without us and this is very bad,” said Viktoriya, who runs a souvenir shop in central Kyiv that sells toilet paper emblazoned with President Putin’s face.

“Every Ukrainian probably knows someone who has been killed in this war. Just imagine how many people that is. It will be painful, if it turns out that they died in vain because we gave up our territories. There will be outrage.

“As for Trump, he is a businessman. He wants our mineral wealth for selfish reasons. I don’t think he is thinking about America, only himself. Where will the money from our resources go? Into the pockets of Trump and his friends?”

Russia has confirmed media reports that Major General Yaroslav Moskalik of the Russian army was killed in a car bombing in Balashikha, near Moscow, this morning.

“According to initial information, the blast took place as the result of the detonation of an improvised explosive device packed with fragments,” said Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for the Investigative Committee, which opened a murder investigation.

Video of the incident published by the 112 Telegram channel showed the vehicle exploding in a ball of flame and spraying debris on to surrounding parked cars.

Kommersant newspaper reported that the victim, aged 59, had been involved in planning of Russian military operations in Ukraine.

Donald Trump has said “Crimea will stay with Russia” and again blamed Kyiv for provoking Moscow’s invasion.

“I think what caused the war to start was when they [Ukraine] started talking about joining Nato,” the US President said in an interview with Time magazine, published on Friday.

The interview comes as Trump pushes for a peace deal before his 100th day in office, which falls on Wednesday. Any potential deal could see President Putin keep vast swathes of Ukraine’s territory including the Black Sea peninsula which Russia annexed in 2014.

Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday that Crimea had been “lost years ago” and that its status was “not even a point of discussion”.

A man who died in a car explosion in Moscow this morning has been identified by Russian media as Major General Yaroslav Moskalik.

The victim’s identify has yet to be confirmed but if it is Moskalik it will be the latest in a series of deaths of senior officers on Russian territory, which have been attributed to Ukraine’s secret services.

Several Russian Telegram channels reported that the general was killed when a Volkswagen exploded as he left his apartment block.

In December, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov was killed in Moscow in an assassination claimed by Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service.

• Russia arrests Ukrainian ‘agent’ over killing of general

The White House, Steve Witkoff, is on his way to meet President Putin after landing in Moscow earlier.

The two men are gathering for discussions after the Russian foreign minister signalled Moscow was ready to agree a deal.

President Trump has insisted he is applying pressure to Russia to end the conflict

President Trump, who initially pledged to end the war in “24 hours”, has grown weary of the talks and wants a speedy conclusion to negotiations.

In Paris earlier this month, President Zelensky’s team was presented with a one-page peace proposal and informed that this was Trump’s “final offer”, according to Axios, a news website.

It revealed that the US president was offering to legally recognise Russian sovereignty of Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Putin in 2014, and wanted to freeze the conflict along the current front lines, allowing the Russian president to keep what he had captured in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk and Donetsk.

• How the US lost patience with talks to end the war in Ukraine

For President Trump, the solution to the war in Ukraine is extremely simple: Kyiv should recognise the realities on the ground and put aside its objections to the Kremlin’s land grabs.

For many Ukrainians, though, Trump’s demands are not only unrealistic but a threat to the very existence of their country.

For Kyiv, the recognition of Russia’s seizure of Crimea would set a “dangerous precedent” and only encourage President Putin’s appetite for Ukrainian lands, according to Volodymyr Fesenko, a political analyst who is seen as close to President Zelensky’s administration.

• Why Ukraine would rather fight on than give Crimea to Russia

The decade-long Afghan war proved a deeply formative experience for Russian and Ukrainian troops, bonding them in action in a way that made the subsequent enmity between the two nations all the more shocking (Anthony Loyd writes in Kharkiv).

By the time they withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the Soviet army had lost more than 15,000 soldiers. The dead included more than 3,600 Ukrain

As Ukraine continues to shed all traces of any shared relationship with Russia, memories of the Afghan conflict are changing again.ian troops — over a thousand more than the 2,459 Americans who died there between 2001 and 2021.

• How Ukrainian and Russian troops went from brothers-in-arms to mortal foes

Russian missiles overwhelmed the British military in an simulated air attack, it has emerged, prompting calls for homeland defence to be beefed up.

In 2022, the RAF simulated the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as if the air attack were playing out against the UK. Some of the missiles are understood to have got through the defences.

Beyond the nuclear deterrent and the air defences provided by its Nato allies, the UK is almost totally reliant on its fleet of six Type 45 destroyers to ward off the ballistic missile attacks. The Type 45 is due to be decommissioned between 2035 and 2038.

• Russian missiles overwhelm Britain in simulated attack

People have begun leaving flowers at the site of yesterday’s deadly Russian missile attack on Kyiv.

Among the victims was a 17-year-old boy whose body was pulled from the rubble more than 12 hours after a ballistic missile, thought to have been provided by North Korea, slammed into a residential district.

Dozens of his friends and classmates had been at the scene since early morning, hoping for a miracle. Young people and rescue workers burst into tears when his body was finally retrieved.

“He was the best friend. He was walking my dog yesterday. And now he’s just gone. This is hard to believe. Everyone is crying and can’t comprehend what happened,” Viktoriya, 17, told Unicef.

When you see two dozen children start crying at the same time, it’s like dipping your head into hell,” Yulia Surkova, a Ukrainian journalist, wrote on social media.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, told CBS, the American television channel, that Moscow had the “right” to hit the neighbourhood, if its commanders believed it was being used for military purposes.

The Times and other media outlets saw no indication that any military hardware or troops had been targeted by the strike.

Boris Johnson has slammed the latest peace proposals saying “Putin must pay” and it is “unthinkable” to give the Russian leader a “bailout”.

The former prime minister said despite the fact that Putin “indiscriminately butchers” Ukrainian civilians, he is being rewarded with Ukrainian territory, the right to control Ukraine’s destiny, the lifting of sanctions, an economic partnership with the US and a chance to rebuild Russia’s armed forces.

“As for Ukraine — what do they get after three years of heroic resistance against a brutal and unprovoked invasion? What is their reward for the appalling sacrifices they have made — for the sake, as they have endlessly been told, of freedom and democracy around the world?”

President Zelensky has said he wants President Trump to realise “Russia is the aggressor”.

“We consider [the] United States as a strong strategic partner with an influence, and we would really like to have peace through strength, that would be useful with Russia so that the force would be toward Russia because they’re the aggressor,” the Ukrainian leader said.

“I highly respect the fact that he’s searching for [peace]. That’s his approach,” Zelensky added.

“But you shouldn’t be saying that Ukraine … started this war. I believe that it’s painful for our people to hear. This is why we responded this way.”

Zelensky’s comments were made in the first of a two-part interview with Ben Shapiro — one of a small number of prominent conservatives backing continued US support for Ukraine.

Russia is ready to agree a deal on the war in Ukraine, Russia’s foreign minister has told US television after President Trump urged Vladimir Putin to halt attacks on the Ukrainian capital.

“We are ready to reach a deal, but there are still some specific points … which need to be fine-tuned, and we are busy with this,” Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with CBS News.

Lavrov indicated there was progress in the negotiations and the US president was “probably the only leader on Earth who recognised the need to address the root causes of this situation”.

But he added that Trump “did not spell out the elements of the deal”.

• Trump’s Ukraine plan is light on safeguards and heavy on concessions

Russian forces have “significantly” intensified their offensive near the key Donetsk region town of Pokrovsk, using missile and drone strikes on Kyiv and other towns and cities as cover, Ukraine’s top general has said.

“When our strength was focused on defence against missiles and drones, the Russians went on to significantly intensify their ground attacks,” Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces said.

Russia has been seeking to seize Pokrovsk, a vital logistics hub, for months.

Syrskyi’s comments came as three people were killed by Russian drone strikes in Pavlohrad, a town 70 miles to the west.

Another two people were also reported to have died in Russian strikes on Kherson, a city in southern Ukraine. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, also came under attack by Russian drones, officials said.

Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s envoy, has arrived in Moscow for his fourth meeting with President Putin, as the US seeks to seal a deal to end the fighting in Ukraine.

President Zelensky has accused Witkoff of “spreading” Russian narratives about the war and discussing the future of Ukraine without a mandate from Kyiv. He also said the White House envoy had “adopted the strategy of the Russian side”.

Witkoff was heavily criticised for shaking hands with Putin during a meeting in St Petersburg that came just before over 30 people were killed in a Russian missile strike on the Ukrainian city of Sumy on Palm Sunday.

His latest visit comes as Russia’s foreign intelligence service accused their counterparts in Britain and France of working with Russian opposition media to “fabricate accusations of secret ties to Russian political and business circles against Trump’s entourage” in a bid to wreck US peace efforts.

Britain is likely to abandon plans to send thousands of troops to protect Ukraine because the risks are deemed “too high”.

In an apparent softening of plans, Britain and France would no longer have a ground force guarding key cities, ports and nuclear power plants to secure the peace.

It is hoped that this change in military support for Ukraine could see Moscow move its red lines to achieve a peace deal.

Instead, the focus for a security commitment to Ukraine would be on the reconstitution and rearmament of Kyiv’s army, with protection from the air and sea.

British and French military trainers would be sent to western Ukraine. This would fulfill a commitment to put forces inside the country, however they would not be near the front line, guard key installations or be there to protect Ukrainian troops.

• UK could scrap plans to send thousands of troops to Ukraine

President Trump has said he is applying “a lot of pressure” on both Russia and Ukraine to come to a peace agreement.

He told President Putin on his Truth Social platform: “Vladimir, STOP!” after a Russian bombardment on Kyiv killed 12 and left 90 wounded.

President Zelensky had accused the US leader of not applying enough pressure on Putin to agree to a ceasefire.

“I am not happy with the Russian strikes on Kyiv,” Trump wrote.

“Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5,000 soldiers a week are dying. Let’s get the peace deal DONE!”

• Trump: You don’t know what pressure I’m putting on Russia

A Russian attack on the Ukrainian city of Pavlohrad has killed three people, including a child, the regional governor said on Friday.

“The aggressor again conducted a mass attack on the region with drones,” Serhiy Lysak, governor of the central region of Dnipropetrovsk, said on Telegram.

Several fires had broken out in the city, said Lysak posting a photo of a fire raging at a block of flats.

Eight people were wounded with six people taken to hospital, the governor added. Search and rescue operations were ongoing.

The mayor of Kyiv has admitted Ukraine may have to concede land to halt the war with Russia.

Vitali Klitschko said it could be a “temporary” solution to end the three-year-long conflict.

“One of the scenarios is … to give up territory. It’s not fair. But for the peace, temporary peace, maybe it can be a solution, temporary,” Klitschko told BBC Radio 4.

The former world heavyweight boxing champion said he had not discussed the matter with President Zelensky, who has said “there is nothing to talk about” regarding giving up territory to Moscow.

Zelensky has already rejected a US peace proposal involving Ukraine seceding Crimea — which was seized by Moscow in 2014 — to Russia.

“This violates our constitution. This is our territory, the territory of the people of Ukraine.”