Russia ‘wants a piece’ of US wealth — live

“On one side, there is an aggressor. On the other side, there is a victim of aggression, and if somebody understands that situation, then we can move forward.

“But unless or until the United States, for example, will recognise Ukraine as the victim of aggression and will be ready to give assistance to Ukraine as the victim of aggression, then I don’t think we can rely on any meaningful solution.”

The backgrounds of Sergey Lavrov and others in the Russian delegation to the Alaska summit may be a surprise.

• Read in full: Meet Putin’s entourage

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said the summit would last at least six or seven hours, according to state news wire Ria Novosti.

The Russian delegation expected the summit would end with a “result,” Peskov told reporters.

The director of the Save Ukraine charity has said he hoped that the repatriation of abducted Ukrainian children will feature in the US-Russia negotiations taking place in Alaska on Friday.

Mykola Kuleba told Times Radio that the summit was an important step towards a ceasefire as it will provide President Putin with the chance to clearly state what his demands are.

Kuleba, whose charity works to return the estimated 20,000 children forcibly displaced from occupied Ukraine, served as the presidential commissioner for children’s rights after Russia invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014.

He said previous peace talks yielded no concessions from Moscow for the return of those children.

“The United States did not participate in those negotiations and maybe now President Trump will have success. But who knows? We have hope but no guarantees,” Kuleba said.

• Christina Lamb: As a mother and war reporter, Russia’s theft of children is hard to believe

Razom We Stand, a Ukrainian campaign group that seeks an end to the trade of Russian oil and gas, has warned against any US concessions to Putin at today’s Alaska meeting. Last-minute reports suggest Trump plans to offer land or critical minerals, Alaskan resources or business deals to Putin, the group said.

Dr Svitlana Romanenko, the group’s founder, called for Trump to sign sanctions that include 500 per cent tariffs and a total embargo of Russian fossil fuels to help save Ukrainian lives. “A grain of salt is bigger than the concrete measures Russia has made so far towards peace,” she said. “The time for empty threats is over, it’s time to seriously dry up Russia’s war chest.”

Since the beginning of the war, Russia has earned more than $1 trillion from fossil fuel exports, according to the group, which it says is being used to fund the war.

Steve Witkoff, 68, a New York property developer worth an estimated $2 billion and regular golf partner of President Trump. Originally appointed Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Witkoff’s role has broadened and he has effectively taken over the Russia brief, visiting five times and helping to broker the Alaska summit.

Marco Rubio, 54, the secretary of state, and acting national security adviser, is a Russia hawk who once described Putin as a “gangster”. Earlier this week, Rubio said that Ukraine would need security guarantees as part of any peace deal. “To achieve a peace, I think we all recognise it will have to be some conversation about security guarantees,” he said.

John Ratcliffe, 59, the director of the CIA and Trump loyalist who recently commissioned a review discrediting US spy agencies’ previous assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

Scott Bessent, 62, the Treasury secretary, a hedge fund manager worth $600 million and Republican donor, has told European countries to “put up or shut up” about Russian sanctions, accusing them of double standards for purchasing Russian oil refined in India.

Pete Hegseth, 45, the defence secretary and former Fox News presenter, once said the importance of the war in Ukraine “pales in comparison” to battling “wokeness”. He has also said that America is no longer “primarily focused” on European security, and earlier this year is said to have suspended weapons deliveries to Ukraine without consulting the White House.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, has told a Russian state television presenter that Trump will meet Putin at the steps of the Russian leader’s aircraft upon his arrival in Alaska at 11am local time (8pm BST).

On his way to his meeting with Trump, President Putin laid flowers at a memorial in the far eastern Russian city of Magadan which commemorates US-Soviet cooperation during the Second World War, state media reported.

The sculpture shows a handshake of a Soviet and American pilot to recognise the two countries’ alliance during the war.

Earlier he toured a fish oil factory in the city, as shown in a Kremlin official video.

Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president in his first term, said he was “praying for President Trump to stand strong … A ceasefire followed by a just and lasting peace will only come through American strength.”

Pence fell out with Trump after the January 6 Capitol riots and ran against him in the 2024 Republican presidential primary.

He has previously been critical of the US president’s framing of the war in Ukraine. In a post earlier this year, he wrote: “Mr President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The road to peace must be built on the truth.”

Bridget Brink, who was US ambassador to Ukraine for three years until this year and lived under regular Russian missile and drone attacks, said the Trump administration lacks a coherent strategy toward Russia.

“The shoot-from-the-hip approach will not help achieve US interests,” she wrote on X. “Putin’s ambitions extend beyond Ukraine: he wants to weaken Europe and undermine the United States.”

She added that America had “already given Putin a victory by meeting with the US president on US soil without making any concessions”.

Brink stepped down as US ambassador to Ukraine this year in protest of what she said was Trump’s unfair treatment of the country. She is running for Congress as a Democrat in one of Michigan’s most competitive districts.

President Trump has thanked the authoritarian president of Belarus for releasing 16 prisoners in a post on Truth Social, adding that the pair spoke on the phone as Trump travelled to Anchorage.

Last month, Lukashenko announced he had pardoned 16 prisoners convicted of criminal charges, including extremism — a charge often used against dissidents and government critics. The leader has overseen the mass arrest of Belarussians since he was handed a sixth term of office in 2020, in an election that international observers have denounced as rigged.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican congresswoman, has accused President Zelensky of trying to “sabotage” US-Russian peace talks by launching drone strikes ahead of Friday’s summit in Alaska.

An overnight drone strike on an apartment block in the southwestern Russian city of Kursk killed one person and wounded 12 others, the region’s acting governor said.

“On the eve of the historic peace talks between President Trump and President Putin, Zelensky does this,” Greene wrote in a post on X.

“Zelensky doesn’t want peace and obviously is trying to sabotage President Trump’s heroic efforts to end the war in Ukraine.

“I pray peace prevails,” she added.

Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defence, is travelling to Alaska separately from President Trump, according to a US official.

The US delegation that departed from Joint Base Andrews included 16 administration officials, among them Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, and John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA.

It’s unclear why Hegseth travelled separately to the summit.

In the last few minutes, Russia has launched a ballistic missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, according to local officials.

“Dnipro district. Missile attack. There are casualties. A fire has broken out. We are investigating the details,” Serhiy Lysak, the governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, wrote in a post on Telegram.

Smoke could be seen rising from a residential district in the city, a key logistics and military hub approximately 350km east of Kyiv.

President Trump earlier told reporters on Air Force One that he believed Russian military strikes overnight in Ukraine were a negotiating tactic by Putin.

A New York museum has called for President Putin to be arrested once he sets foot on US soil.
The Beka Museum, which stages art exhibitions at the Rockefeller Center, published a letter requesting Pam Bondi, the US Attorney General, to arrest the Russian leader upon his arrival in Alaska.

The letter highlights Putin’s role in the forced deportation of Ukrainian children and other atrocities committed under his rule, as well as an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant issued against him.

The US is not a signed-up member of the ICC, but the museum noted that such actions could be prosecuted under US federal law, including the War Crimes statute and the 1954 Hague Convention protecting cultural property in armed conflict.

“A nation’s culture is its soul made visible. In Ukraine, that soul is under siege — especially in Russian-occupied territories — its monuments shattered, its children stolen, its songs silenced,” Shota Bagaturia, director of Beka Museum, told the Kyiv Independent ahead of the summit.

Ukraine is deploying reinforcements to the eastern region where Russian troops hava made rapid advances towards the mining hub of Dobropillia, President Zelensky has said.

“Today a decision was made to further reinforce this and other areas in the Donetsk region,” Zelensky said in a statement on social media.

“The Russian army continues to suffer significant losses in its attempts to secure more favourable political positions for the Russian leadership at the meeting in Alaska,” he added.

Mike Dunleavy, the Republican governor of Alaska, has said that he hopes the summit will set the groundwork for a “lasting peace” between Ukraine and Russia.

Dunleavy told Fox News that it “makes sense” for the meeting to take place in Alaska, given its strategic location.

“We got our fingers crossed. We’ll see how this goes in terms of outcomes. But the world is watching. The world is watching Alaska,” he said.

Dunleavy added that he had noticed an increase in the amount of menacing behaviour from the Russian military over the past month, without providing specifics.

“We’ve got a robust military, so we sleep well at night. Again, getting this war behind us, I think, is going to bode well for everybody, but it’s got to be a just peace and it’s got to work for all parties.”

Hillary Clinton has offered to nominate Donald Trump for a Nobel peace prize if he can negotiate a ceasefire in Ukraine without “capitulation” to Russia.

The former secretary of state, who lost to Trump in the 2016 presidential election, told the Raging Moderates podcast that the summit in Alaska presented an “opportunity”.

“Honestly if he could bring about the end to this terrible war, if he could end it without putting Ukraine in a position where it had to concede its territory to the aggressor, could really stand up to Putin — something we haven’t seen but maybe this is the opportunity,” Clinton said.

“If President Trump were the architect of that, I’d nominate him for a Nobel peace prize. Because my goal here is to not allow capitulation to Putin.”

Trump, who has described himself as the “president of peace”, has long expressed his desire to receive the prize, which has been awarded to several American presidents, including Barack Obama.

President Zelensky has said Ukraine is “counting on America” before the summit in Alaska begins.

In a post on X, the Ukrainian leader said: “The key thing is that this meeting should open up a real path toward a just peace and a substantive discussion between leaders in a trilateral format: Ukraine, the United States and the Russian side.

“It is time to end the war and the necessary steps must be taken by Russia. We are counting on America. We are ready, as always, to work as productively as possible.”

Zelensky added that he would receive a report from the Ukrainian intelligence services today “on the current intentions of the Russian side and its preparations for the meeting in Alaska”.

The economic consequences for Russia would be “very severe” if Putin doesn’t agree to a ceasefire, President Trump has said.

“I’m not doing this for my health. OK, I don’t need it,” he told reporters on Air Force One on his way to Anchorage.

“I’d like to focus on our country, but I’m doing this to save a lot of lives.”

Asked about the possibility of the US providing security guarantees to Ukraine, Trump replied: “Maybe, along with Europe and other countries.

“Not in the form of Nato, because that’s not going to, you know, there are certain things that aren’t going to happen.

“But yeah, along with Europe, there’s possibility.”

Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, which will host today’s summit, is home to 32,000 people and has been in use as a military airfield since 1940, according to the US air force.

The 64,000-acre site in Anchorage was formed in 2010 by the merging of Elmendorf Air Force Base and Fort Richardson as part of a consolidation process by the US military. It played a crucial role in countering Soviet aggression during the height of the Cold War, when it hosted aircraft and oversaw operations to detect Soviet military activity and possible nuclear launches.

While much of the military hardware has since been deactivated, the base still hosts key aircraft squadrons, including the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jet. It routinely scrambles US warplanes to counter Russian incursions into American airspace.

Trump suggested that his personal relationship with President Putin would be crucial to reaching a peace agreement.

“He’s a smart guy, been doing it for a long time. But so have I,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One en route to Anchorage. “But here we are, we’re presidents. We get along. There’s a good respect level on both sides.”

Trump told reporters on Air Force One that the prospect of territorial concessions would be discussed at the meeting but would have to be approved by Ukraine.

“I have to let Ukraine make that decision,” Trump said. “I think they’ll make a proper decision, but I’m not here to negotiate for Ukraine. I’m here to get them at a table.”

President Zelensky has categorically rejected any deal with Moscow involving ceding land after Trump suggested such a concession would be beneficial to both sides. A peace deal that requires Kyiv to swap Ukrainian territory with Russia would be illegal under its constitution.

• What are the options for Ukraine’s border? Maps explained

Asked about more Russian drone strikes overnight in Ukraine, Trump said he believed the attacks were a negotiating tactic by Putin.

“He’s trying to set a stage. In his mind, it helps him make a better deal. It actually hurts him,” Trump said. “But in his mind that helps him make a better deal if they can continue the killing. Maybe it’s a part of the world, maybe it’s just his fabric, his genes, his genetics. I’ll be talking to him about it.”

President Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he hopes the Alaska summit will lead to economic deals with Russia once a peace agreement has been reached.

“I notice he’s bringing a lot of business people from Russia, and that’s good. I like that because they want to do business, but we’re not doing business until we get the war settled,” Trump said. “We have the hottest country on Earth. We have the hottest economy on Earth.

“He wants a piece of that, because his country is not hot economically. In fact its the opposite. I want everybody to do well. But the war’s got to stop and the killing’s got to stop.”

About 120,000 Ukrainian refugees living in the US will start losing their legal status from today after the Trump administration suspended their protection, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Uniting for Ukraine, a Biden-era programme, had provided Ukrainian refugees with a two-year renewable visa so long as they found a US sponsor.

Trump wound down the programme in January as part of a broader push to tighten US immigration policy. He signalled last month that Ukrainians who had fled Russia’s invasion would be allowed to remain in the US until the war ends. But by allowing the programme to lapse, those covered are subject to potential arrest and deportation, the Journal reported.

President Zelensky spoke with President Macron on Thursday and again on Friday before the US-Russia summit, the French presidential office has said.

The leaders agreed to meet each other after the summit in Alaska when “it will be most useful and effective”, Macron’s office said in a statement.

President Trump previously said a second summit including Zelensky was required to make progress in ending the war.

President Trump is on board Air Force One and en route to Alaska. The flight from Washington is expected to take about seven and a half hours, meaning that the summit’s start time may be delayed.

The White House previously said the meeting would start at 11am local time (8pm UK time), while Russia said it would start 30 minutes later.

Russian journalists were given camp beds to rest on at a sports arena in Anchorage while they waited to cover the summit.

A video posted online showed the beds separated by curtains in the Alaska Airlines Center, which is typically used by the local university’s sports teams.

One Ukrainian communications and security expert, Maria Avdeeva, called the arrangements “a bit upscale for propaganda mouthpieces” and warned the reporters might steal the lavatories.

Press freedom in Russia is severely restricted. Almost all independent media has been banned, blocked and/or declared “foreign agents” since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The American delegation accompanying Trump includes Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, and John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA.

Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, will be participating as well as Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, who met Putin in Moscow this month.

Russia previously suggested that as well as Trump and Putin’s one-to-one meeting, a bilateral discussion with five representatives from both sides would take place.

However, the full list of the US delegation includes 16 names, among them Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, and Monica Crowley, the chief of protocol.

Crowley posted on X saying she was on board Air Force One, waiting to take off for the meeting.

When Pope John Paul II met President Reagan in Alaska, he hailed the 49th US state as “a crossroads of the world” (David Charter writes).

This was literally true, serving as a refuelling stop for both leaders as they crisscrossed the globe, but it also reflected a turning point in history as they plotted to liberate Poland and the other Warsaw Pact countries from Soviet control.

A few years earlier President Nixon had his own historic meeting in Alaska’s largest city, Anchorage, with Emperor Hirohito, on a stopover to a state visit to Britain. It was the first time a reigning Japanese monarch had set foot on foreign soil.

Alaska finds itself once again at a crossroads geographically and politically, this time for two leaders in President Trump and President Putin who are poised to make momentous decisions on war and peace.

• Read in full: Peace is a big deal for us too — Russia’s only two miles away

The world was a different place in July 2018 when Trump last held a one-to-one summit with Putin, in Helsinki (Catherine Philp writes).

Russia had illegally annexed Crimea four years earlier. Finland was still officially neutral territory, having not yet joined Nato.

The subsequent press conference provoked criticism of Trump, who appeared to have accepted Putin’s denials that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 US presidential election.

The Republican John McCain called it “a disgraceful performance”, adding: “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”

During Trump’s first term, the two leaders met only once, at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, in 2019.

The stakes today are much higher and the US president, who no longer faces much criticism from Republicans, has said he will be in “listening mode”.

But unlike in 2018, Trump has expressed his doubts about Putin’s sincerity, expressing awareness of the gap between the Russian leader’s private promises and public actions.

President Trump has summarised the importance of the summit in Alaska with President Putin in a two-word post on Truth Social.

“HIGH STAKES!” the president wrote on his social media platform.

Trump is expected to leave for the summit shortly, on a flight from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

President Trump is expected to roll out the red carpet for President Putin upon arrival at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, NBC reported, citing two officials.

Trump was planning to greet the Russian leader when he arrived, although officials said the exact details of the meeting were still being finalised.

It is Putin’s first visit to the US in a decade and his invitation is being portrayed as a diplomatic win by Russian media after years of isolation.

The potential of a warm welcome has not been received well by Ukrainians. “Red from the blood of Ukrainians murdered by this dictator, perhaps?” one user said on X.

The report came after Sir Keir Starmer rolled out the red carpet at Downing Street for President Zelensky on Thursday.

Western analysts have cautioned that the summit may be a largely symbolic event, rather than making significant gains towards securing peace in Ukraine.

Satellite images suggest Russia has established infrastructure at an air base in the southwest, designed for storing and launching the one-way attack drones that target Ukraine.

In recent months, drone launch sites were built at several locations closer to the battlefield in Ukraine, including an air base in southwest Russia.

The images appear to show new storage areas and launch rails for the drones, which are capable of carrying explosive warheads up to 1,000 kilometres. They are launched in waves alongside missiles and decoys in an effort to overwhelm Ukrainian air defences.

Russia has stepped up production of drones and increased the scale of its attacks in recent months, often launching dozens or hundreds of threats in each wave. While Ukraine has targeted Russia’s main drone production facility multiple times, it continues to operate and expand.

The exiled Russian opposition figure Yulia Navalnaya urged Presidents Putin and Trump to strike a deal to free Russian and Ukrainian political prisoners held captive by Moscow for speaking out against the war in Ukraine.

“Release Russian political activists and journalists, Ukrainian civilians, those who were imprisoned for anti-war statements and posts on social media,” Navalnaya, whose husband Alexei Navalny died in a Russian prison last year, said in a video on social media.

Ukraine’s military hit a major oil refinery in the Samara region of Russia, a Caspian Sea port and a cargo vessel used to transport military supplies, Kyiv said.

The Syzran refinery, one of the largest in Russia’s Rosneft energy system, supplies aviation fuel to the military and caught fire after the attack, Ukrainian officials said.

The Ukrainian military said it had struck the vessel Port Olya-4 in the Astrakhan region on Thursday, which it said had been transporting drone parts and ammunition from Iran.

Samara’s governor said a drone attack had caused a fire at an unspecified “industrial enterprise”but that it had been put out quickly. The Russian defence ministry said it had shot down Ukrainian drones over nine regions.

Russian air attacks had killed six civilians across Ukraine over the past 24 hours, officials in the frontline Ukrainian regions Kharkiv and Donetsk reported on Friday morning.

The Russian army has continued its offensive in eastern Ukraine, forcing Kyiv to extend evacuation orders for civilians in Donetsk.

The evacuation zone covers the town of Druzhkivka, close to where Russian forces made a swift advance into Ukrainian territory.

On Thursday the Russian defence ministry claimed control of two more Ukrainian villages that had been fought over for months.

On Wednesday Ukraine ordered evacuations from another town, Bilozerske, a day after reports that Kremlin troops had advanced as much as 17km in a narrow section of the front line near Druzhkivka and Dobropillia.

It was the biggest gain over 24 hours in more than a year, according to military analysts.

President Putin is insisting on the “denazification and demilitarisation” of Ukraine, a Russian political analyst has told state television in Moscow.

Putin said at the start of the war that Russia was seeking to topple Kyiv’s “neo-Nazi” government, and the Kremlin has since demanded limits on the size of Ukraine’s army “before there can be any peace”.

Dmitri Trenin, a member of Russia’s foreign and defence policy council, said: “We talk about denazification as the goal of the special military operation, but what exactly it will include is a possible subject of discussion. Or demilitarisation — how many tanks or planes Ukraine will have.”

His comments, which will have been aired on state TV with the Kremlin’s approval, indicate that Putin is heading to Alaska to discuss more than Ukrainian territorial concessions.

Sergey Lavrov, 75, Putin’s foreign minister since 2004, represents the uncompromising face of foreign policy towards the West. He has framed the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a necessary response to western “aggression” and dismissed reports of Russian atrocities as fabricated.

Kirill Dmitriev, 50, special envoy and head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, was born in Kyiv before moving to California as a teenager. Educated at Stanford and Harvard, and having worked for Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Co, he is considered the most US-savvy member of Russia’s elite. In April, Dmitriev travelled to Washington under temporary sanction relief. He met the US envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow this month.

Andrei Belousov, 65, minister of defence since May last year and an economist, who served as the first deputy prime minister, was reported to have been the only member of Putin’s “economic entourage” to support Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Anton Siluanov, 62, minister of finance since 2011, is known for his conservative fiscal approach. He has steered federal finances through western sanctions, including those that helped trigger a financial crisis in 2014. His participation at the summit suggests that sanctions relief could be central to Russia’s negotiation strategy.

Yuri Ushakov, 78, has served as foreign policy adviser since 2012. He was the ambassador to Washington for a decade until 2008 and is often referred to as the architect of the Kremlin’s anti-western policy. He led preparations for talks with Ukraine in Istanbul in May, where Kyiv said he made impossible demands that would mean Ukraine’s capitulation.

Russia expects a return visit from Trump after Friday’s summit, Rodion Miroshnik, a Russian foreign ministry envoy, told local media.

“If the Russian leader travels to the US, we expect the US president to visit Russia in return,” he said. “This is only logical and underscores the development and expansion of relations between Russia and the US, given that ties between the two largest geopolitical powers are not just about Ukraine.”

A Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman has posted a video of a moose in Anchorage and suggested it represented a desperate President Zelensky trying to get into the summit between Trump and Putin.

The video, showing the animal crossing the road and walking past the sign of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, appeared to be taken from the BBC’s Russian service.

Maria Zakharova, director of the ministry’s information and press department, commented on the video: “Zelensky doesn’t know what to come up with any more,” after another Russian suggested the moose was trying to break into the base where the US and Russian leaders will meet.

John Healey, the defence secretary, told Today on BBC Radio 4 that Britain would put boots on the ground in Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire deal between Russia and Ukraine.

However, he refused to say whether the British forces would stay and fight if the Ukrainians came under attack from the Russians. He said such a question was a “hypothetical” which he wouldn’t get into.

Before Russia’s invasion in February 2022, the UK pulled out its training troops as Putin mounted his forces on the border amid fears about coming under attack.

There are concerns that putting European soldiers on the ground in insufficient numbers could fail to deter Putin from attacking them as a way of testing Nato. It remains unclear whether the United States would provide any security guarantees such as air defences or aircraft.

Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said he expected Putin to enter into negotiations with Ukraine “without preconditions” after the meeting in Alaska.

“Three and a half years after its attack on Ukraine, which violated international law, Russia now has the opportunity to agree to a ceasefire and end hostilities,” Merz said on Friday morning.

Merz said Germany, alongside Ukraine and its European allies, had in recent days shown the way to peace that preserved the fundamental security interests of Europe and Ukraine.

“The goal must be a summit in which President Zelensky also participates,” he said. “At it, a ceasefire must be agreed. Ukraine needs strong security guarantees. Territorial issues can only be decided with the consent of the Ukrainians. We conveyed these messages to President Trump clearly and unanimously on his way to Anchorage. I am in constant contact with him on this matter.”

Asked whether the American president’s approach to Russia meant Britain should change its approach to dialogue with Moscow, John Healey told Times Radio: “I think, well, first of all, we need to see what happens in the discussions today and whether they lead to serious negotiations that will properly involve Ukraine in the future.

“But our first priority is to continue to stand with Ukraine, as we have since the outset of this full scale war, to step up our support for the diplomatic pressure and the economic pressure on Putin, but also to keep a focus on the front line while all eyes are on Alaska, because we can’t jeopardise the peace by forgetting about the war.”

The “pressure and the focus” must be on Putin as the talks get underway, the defence secretary added.

John Healey, Britain’s defence secretary, described the talks between President Trump and President Putin as “first steps” towards a potential peace, which could lead to “serious negotiations” that involve Ukraine.

Asked whether the meeting in Alaska was simply a “reward” for Putin, Healey told Times Radio: “It’s a recognition that you can only end fighting by talking. And to have talking and serious negotiation, it requires someone to broker those talks.

“President Trump is playing that role in a way that only President Trump can, and it’s why we and other European leaders and Ukraine have been willing to give President Trump our full support in trying to take these first steps.”

Russia will not make guesses on the outcome of Friday’s summit between Presidents Trump and Putin, Moscow’s foreign minister said after landing in Alaska.

“We never make any predictions ahead of time,” Sergey Lavrov told Russian state TV.

“We know that we have our arguments and our position is clear and unambiguous. We will present it.”

The rush-hour protest was a dress rehearsal for several demonstrations planned around Anchorage during the day on Friday, including one in front of a main entrance to the military base hosting the summit.

Organisers say they will unfurl the largest Ukrainian flag in the world, measuring 25,000 square feet, in a park in central Anchorage at 2pm local time.

“We don’t agree with having an international war criminal here to distract from some of the other issues that are going on in the world, including the Epstein files and the genocide in Gaza,” said Lindsay Nielsen, 41, as she handed out flyers to passers-by on Thursday night.

She added: “If they actually want to work toward a ceasefire and/or peace with Russia and Ukraine, that would be fantastic … I just don’t think that anything real will come out of this conversation. I think it’s just a lot of pomp and circumstance to drum up distraction.”

Several hundred protesters gathered during the Anchorage rush hour on Thursday night on a main city road junction waving Ukrainian flags and placards denouncing President Trump and President Putin.

Clint Sayer, 69, a retired graphic artist carrying an image of President Trump wearing a Russian-style fur hat, said: “I’m very much against the way this is going with Putin — he’s a war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court. We should have supported that and yet here he is, and Zelensky’s not here even though it’s his country.”

Dean Knapp, 72, walking unsteadily with a stick, said: “My issue is that I’m a cancer patient, stage four, and Trump has fired cancer researchers. Now he’s building prisons instead.”

He added: “I think this is pure show theatre. I don’t think Trump has any real hope of convincing Putin to back out. He just wants to look important.”

The Alaska summit will be the first time Putin has had an in-person audience with an American president since he met Joe Biden in 2021, or since he ordered the invasion of Ukraine the next year.

The talks are set for Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, a US military facility considered a secure enough venue to host the meeting.

It is home to about 32,000 military personnel and their families, about 10 per cent of the population of Anchorage, which is Alaska’s largest city.

Russian and American special agents are also expected to protect the two leaders and their delegations.

The Russian foreign minister arrived in Alaska wearing a sweater with the letters “CCCP” written on it, the Russian acronym for the former Soviet Union, or USSR, according to Russian media.

Video showed Sergey Lavrov wearing a gilet over a white sweater, of which part of the inscription was visible. He told journalists that it was not his first time in Alaska.

The reminder of Cold War politics echoes Russian state media’s attempts to portray Trump and Putin’s summit as between the world’s two “superpowers”.

Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, has suggested that Putin could offer new arms control treaties with the US

The previous Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, signed by the presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 to limit the production of short and medium-range ballistic missiles, has since been rejected by both sides, with the US citing Russian violations.

Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s special representative for investment co-operation, called the talks “an important meeting for the whole world” and a chance to convey Russia’s position “directly and clearly”.

Educated in the US, Dimitriev is a key member of Russia’s five-man negotiating team.

“And it is important that the dialogue continues,” he said, according to local media. “And we hope for a very constructive dialogue. There is a lot of misinformation about Russia and, of course, this is an important opportunity to convey Russia’s position directly and clearly to the American side.”

Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and Alexander Darchiyev, Moscow’s ambassador to Washington, have arrived in Anchorage in preparation for the summit.

The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said President Putin was on a regional trip to Magadan, in Russia’s far east, where he will meet the governor and visit an industrial site before flying to Alaska. A plane carrying Russian journalists, which was granted a temporary, single-entry visa, has already landed in Anchorage.