US President Donald Trump has renewed a threat to impose sanctions on Russia if there is no progress toward a peaceful settlement in Ukraine within two weeks, expressing frustration at Moscow a week after his meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska. “I’m going to make a decision as to what we do and it’s going to be a very important decision, and that’s whether or not it’s massive sanctions or massive tariffs or both, or we do nothing and say it’s your fight,” Trump said on Friday. He cited unhappiness over a Russian strike on an American factory in Ukraine that caused a fire and injured employees.
During the same White House event, Trump showed a photograph of his meeting with Putin, suggesting the Russian leader might attend the 2026 World Cup in the US. “I’m going to sign this for him. But I was sent one, and I thought you would like to see it, it’s a man named Vladimir Putin, who I believe will be coming, depending on what happens,” Trump said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of doing everything to prevent a meeting between him and Putin, which he sees as essential for negotiating an end to the war. “The meeting is one of the components of how to end the war. And since they don’t want to end it, they will look for space to avoid it,” he said at a press conference with Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told NBC that no agenda exists for such a summit. “Putin is ready to meet with Zelenskyy when the agenda would be ready for a summit. And this agenda is not ready at all,” he said. Meanwhile, Putin said Trump’s leadership qualities could help restore US-Russia relations, noting their “very good, meaningful and frank meeting in Alaska.”
Ukraine attacked a key pumping station on the Druzhba oil pipeline, disrupting supplies to Hungary and Slovakia, the only EU states still receiving Russian oil. The Hungarian and Slovakian governments wrote to the European Commission, warning that supplies could be suspended for at least five days. “The physical and geographical reality is that without this pipeline, the safe supply of our countries is simply not possible,” their foreign ministers said.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner mercenary group founder, appeared “doomed” after his failed mutiny and told his mother he expected to die before his private plane crash in 2023, according to an interview with his mother Violetta Prigozhina. “When I last saw him, he looked doomed,” she said.
