VLADIMIR Putin is ready to meet Ukraine's President Zelensky, according a top Kremlin minister - but only after working through a list of vague "issues". Pressure has been mounting on Vlad to sit down with Zelensky since the White House summit - but the ...

Why it matters: Putin has shown no interest in sitting down with Zelensky through 3.5 years of war. President Trump claims that's now changed, and that a presidential meeting is the key to unlocking peace.

Russia has yet again ignored Donald Trump’s bid to hold a summit between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky and said attempts to resolve security issues for Kyiv without Moscow’s participation was a “road to nowhere”.

President Trump seeks to broker a meeting of the two leaders to end Europe’s most destructive war in generations.

Doing so would require the Russian leader to “accept the failure of sitting down with a president he considers a joke from a country that doesn’t exist”

A summit in Paris six years ago was the first and only time the two presidents ever met, flanked by French president Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s then-chancellor Angela Merkel. At the time, Putin and Zelensky were looking to hash out a ceasefire deal for war in Donbas in Ukraine’s east, where Russia-backed forces were fighting Ukrainian troops.

The conditions blunt the impact of two major wins Trump achieved in his back-to-back meetings with Putin in Alaska on Friday and with Zelensky and top European leaders at the White House on Monday.

Ukrainian analysts watching their president’s return to the White House were braced for a “nightmare.” They took cautious encouragement from what they saw instead.