Ukraine-Russia war latest: Zelensky meets Merz and warns 50,000 Russian troops gathering near Sumy

Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy aide has claimed that Donald Trump doesn’t know the reality of the war in Ukraine.

Yuri Ushakov, one of Putin’s key officials in peace talks, issued the comments after Trump suggested Putin was “playing with fire”.

“We’ve come to the conclusion that Trump is not sufficiently informed about what is really happening in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation,” he told Russian state media.

President Vladimir Putin’s conditions for ending the war in Ukraine include a demand that Western leaders pledge in writing to stop enlarging Nato eastwards and lift a chunk of sanctions on Russia, according to three Russian sources with knowledge of the negotiations who spoke with Reuters.

US president Donald Trump has repeatedly said he wants to end the deadliest European conflict since World War Two and has shown increasing frustration with Putin in recent days, warning on Tuesday the Russian leader was “playing with fire” by refusing to engage in ceasefire talks with Kyiv as his forces made gains on the battlefield.

After speaking to Trump for more than two hours last week, Putin said that he had agreed to work with Ukraine on a memorandum that would establish the contours of a peace accord, including the timing of a ceasefire. Russia says it is currently drafting its version of the memorandum and cannot estimate how long that will take.

Kyiv and European governments have accused Moscow of stalling while its troops advance in eastern Ukraine.

“Putin is ready to make peace but not at any price,” said one senior Russian source with knowledge of top-level Kremlin thinking, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The three Russian sources said Putin wants a “written” pledge by major Western powers not to enlarge the US-led Nato alliance eastwards – shorthand for formally ruling out membership to Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova and other former Soviet republics.

Russia also wants Ukraine to be neutral, some Western sanctions lifted, a resolution of the issue of frozen Russian sovereign assets in the West, and protection for Russian speakers in Ukraine, the three sources said.

The first source said that, if Putin realises he is unable to reach a peace deal on his own terms, he will seek to show the Ukrainians and the Europeans by military victories that “peace tomorrow will be even more painful”.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in comments about US president Donald Trump’s remark that Vladimir Putin was “playing with fire” by refusing to engage in ceasefire talks with Kyiv, said the national interest was paramount for the Russian leader.

He also said in a conference call with reporters on Wednesday that a possible meeting of Putin with Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky should take place only following preparations and talks.

Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier Moscow proposed Belarus, a close ally of Russia, as the next location for peace talks.

According to Reuters, he described such a meeting place as “impossible for Ukraine”.

Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has told an international security conference preparations for the next direct talks are underway, and will occur in the near future.

However, Russia is yet to deliver a memorandum to Ukraine outlining its terms for a ceasefire after the first direct talks between Moscow and Kyiv occurred in Istanbul earlier this month.

Volodymyr Zelensky has been warmly welcomed to Berlin by German chancellor Friedrich Merz this morning.

After arriving at the Chancellery, the pair stood for a welcoming ceremony in which national anthems were played and the Ukrainian leader was treated to full military honours ahead of talks.

The pair will later front the media for a press conference.

Earlier in the week German chancellor Friedrich Merz suggested European leaders had granted Ukraine fresh capabilities to fire long-range weapons at Russia before Berlin corrected that the decision had been made months before.

Mr Merz said there were no longer any range restrictions on the weapons supplied to Ukraine by Britain, France, Germany and the United States, and that Ukraine could now do “long range fire”.

Moscow seized on the comments, with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov telling a press conference on Tuesday the remarks indicated the calibre of people who had risen to power in leading European countries.

“[Mr Merz] said yesterday with such pretentiousness that from now on and forever there are no restrictions on the range of strikes,” Mr Lavrov said at a press conference in Moscow.

Lavrov said other German officials appeared to have contradicted the chancellor and that such contradictory signals suggested to Moscow that European powers had long ago decided to allow Ukraine to make long-range strikes deep into Russia with European missiles but that the decision “was kept secret”.

Volodymyr Zelensky is set to be welcomed to Berlin with full military honours later this morning as he meets with new German chancellor Friedrich Merz.

The meeting is being staged against a backdrop of wavering support for Ukraine from the Trump administration and comments from Mr Merz before he took the chancellorship that Germany needed to ween itself off American security.

Mr Merz, a conservative who took office this month, has vowed to take more of a leadership role in ensuring support for Ukraine than his Social Democrat predecessor Olaf Scholz.

Zelensky said on Tuesday he was grateful to Mr Merz for previously coming to Kyiv, but there were “things that we could not discuss because we did not have a long one-on-one. And we agreed that the time will come when I will come to Berlin and we will talk about it.”

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has arrived in Berlin for peace talks with German chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Mr Zelensky is in Germany to shore up continued support for Ukraine’s defence against Russia’s invasion, with Mr Merz among Europe’s strongest backers of Ukraine.

Mr Merz said on Tuesday he believed the war would drag on because of Russia’s reluctance to negotiate.

“Wars typically end because of economic or military exhaustion on one side or on both sides and in this war we are obviously still far from reaching that (situation)”, Mr Merz said at a joint press conference with Finish prime minister Petteri Orpo in Turku, Finland.

“So we may have to prepare for a longer duration.”

These images show the aftermath of what Russian authorities say are the result of a Ukrainian drone attack that has taken out homes near Moscow.

Firefighters work to douse the structures, fully ablaze after the strike, as both sides continue to trade fire, with Russia claiming to have downed nearly 300 Ukrainian drones overnight.

“We are ready to meet at the level of leaders. The American side knows this, and the Russian side knows this. We are ready for the ‘Trump, Putin, and me’ format, and we are ready for the Trump-Putin, Trump-Zelensky format, and then the three of us,” Zelensky said.

The report comes after Zelensky challenged the Russian president to meet him in Istanbul for direct talks earlier this month, a dare shunned by Putin, who instead sent a junior delegation to negotiate with Ukrainian officials.

His latest comments also follow a phone call between Trump and Putin last week, which came after the US president vowed to meet Putin “as soon as we can” and Moscow asserting peace could only be achieved through direct talks between the US and Russia.