Trump says Putin will not ‘mess around’ at Alaska summit — as it happened

The talks will continue over a working breakfast, which is expected to include five-member delegations from each country accompanied by aides.

The Russian delegation will include Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister; Yuri Ushakov, a presidential aide; Andrei Belousov, the defence minister; Anton Siluanov, the finance minister; and Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund.

It is unclear who will accompany Trump, but he is typically joined at bilateral meetings by JD Vance, the vice-president; Marco Rubio, the secretary of state; and Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary.

After the discussions, it is expected that the two leaders will hold a joint press conference.

The Russian delegation will fly back as soon as the talks are over, a Kremlin official has said.

President Trump’s summit with President Putin in Alaska will be the first meeting between the Russian leader and an American counterpart since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

When Putin launched the invasion, he gave a speech claiming that Russia was “seeking peace”. He blamed the war on Nato encroachment in eastern Europe and said Ukraine was “a puppet of the West”. There is little sign his views have changed in the three and a half years since.

Meanwhile, Trump returned to the White House in January promising to go down in history as a “peacemaker”.

• Read in full: Five things Trump and Putin may discuss in Alaska — and one they won’t

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 not only literally true, serving as a refuelling stop for both leaders as they crisscrossed the globe — the Pope was on his way to Pacific nations, Reagan returning from China — 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, himself on a stopover to a state visit to Britain. It was the first time a reigning Japanese monarch set foot on foreign soil.

Now Alaska finds itself once again at a crossroads both 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: Alaskans: Peace is a big deal for us too — Russia’s only two miles away

President Putin’s talks in Alaska with President Trump on Friday will be his seventh US-Russia summit meeting since he came to power 25 years ago. It will, however, be the first to take place during a full-scale Russian invasion of a European country (Marc Bennetts writes).

Trump has already had at least six telephone conversations with Putin since he returned to the White House in January. Critics have asked why the Russian leader is being rewarded with a summit on US soil while his forces are attacking Ukraine.

However, in Kyiv, Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to President Zelensky, said that face-to-face talks with Putin would help Trump grasp the depths of the Russian leader’s irrationality and his desire to keep fighting, despite massive losses of his own troops.

“Russia did not attack Ukraine because it needs additional territories,” Podolyak said. “For Russia, the aim of the war is to destroy Ukraine not even as a territory, but as a very concept. But for the US president, or the leader of any democratic country, it is difficult to accept that Putin is not a rational person.”

• Read in full: What does Putin want out of the Alaska summit with Trump?

Trump earlier said that his goal for Friday’s meeting in Alaska was to “set the table” for a potential second meeting between Presidents Putin and Zelensky.

He said he would know within the first few minutes whether it would be a “good” or “bad” meeting.

Trump said he would end the meeting early if it wasn’t going to plan, but if it was, he said “we’ll have peace in the near future”.

Earlier in the press conference, Trump said that the US was no longer spending any money to support Ukraine.

“They [Nato] are paying us for everything,” Trump said. “People are shocked when they hear. We’re not spending money but we are spending a lot of time trying to get the war solved,” he said.

“I’m trying to save lives,” he added.

The US and Ukraine signed a deal in April to share profits from the future sale of Ukraine’s mineral and energy reserves. The deal aimed to provide an economic incentive for the US to continue to invest in Ukraine’s defence and reconstruction.

The press conference has now concluded.

Trump was asked whether he felt President Putin had a “strong hand” coming into the summit on Friday.

“Well he came to our country,” Trump said. “I think that President Putin would like to see a deal, I think if I weren’t president he would take over all of Ukraine.

“But I am president, and he’s not going to mess around,” he added.

Trump was asked again whether he would offer incentives for peace that may reward Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

“I think that we have a situation that should never have started, it should never have started,” Trump replied, avoiding the question.

“It didn’t start under me, and for four years it wasn’t even discussed. I could see it was going to happen,” he said. “Everybody’s to blame, Putin is to blame, they’re all to blame.”

Trump said that he believed Putin and Zelensky “will make peace”.

“We’ll see if they can get along, and if they can, it’ll be great.”

He claimed that he had solved six wars in the last six months, and referred to détentes between Pakistan and India, and Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“I’m very proud of it. I thought the easiest one would be this one.” referring to Ukraine-Russia. “It’s actually the most difficult,” he said.

President Trump was asked about his meeting with President Putin on Friday, and whether he was prepared to offer Putin access to rare metals in exchange for an end to the war in Ukraine.

“We’re going to see what happens, we have a big meeting,” he said.

“I think it’s going to be very important for Russia, and it’s going to be very important for us that we’re going to save a lot of lives.”

Trump added that the purpose of meeting Putin was to save “thousands of soldiers a week”.

“But the more important meeting, will be the second meeting that we’re having — we’re going to have a meeting with President Putin, President Zelensky, myself. And maybe we’ll bring some of the European leaders, maybe not.”

President Trump’s Oval Office press conference began around 30 minutes after the scheduled time with a pledge to make social security benefits stronger, bigger and better.

He is joined by Frank Bisignano, the commissioner of the Social Security Administration.

We’ll bring you any remarks he makes about Friday’s summit with President Putin.

President Putin hopes to achieve something at the negotiating table on Friday that he has failed to do in more than a decade on the battlefield (George Grylls writes).

Conquering the Donbas, the collective name for the east Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, has been the Russian leader’s obsession since 2014.

When Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s corrupt pro-Kremlin president, was ousted that year during the Maidan revolution, Putin sent “little green men” — Russian troops disguised as local separatists — into the Donbas. The fighting has continued since.

At their Alaska summit, Putin wants to convince President Trump to sign away the parts of Donbas that remain under Ukrainian control. Russian troops claim to have conquered the entirety of Luhansk, but much of Donetsk is defended by Ukrainian troops.

• Read in full: Russia’s key demand of Trump is 11 years in the making

President Zelensky held talks with Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, to discuss the war with Russia, closer diplomatic ties, and co-operation on agriculture and technology, he said in a post on X.

“I emphasised that our position is absolutely clear: Ukraine needs an honest peace and reliable security guarantees. Javier is ready to make personal efforts,” Zelensky said of Milei, who is a close ally of President Trump.

President Trump is due to deliver remarks from the White House at 1pm ET (6pm BST), where he will issue a presidential proclamation marking the 90th anniversary of the Social Security Act, according to an administration official.

He is also expected to take questions from reporters about his summit with President Putin in Alaska on Friday.

Trump could be “too easy” in his dealings with Putin at the summit, a former senior US foreign policy official has said.

Jim Townsend, the US deputy assistant secretary of defence for European and Nato policy from 2009-18, told Times Radio that he’s concerned “there’ll be a deal that Putin wants to make, [that] he’s going to strike a deal and the deal is a terrible one, and that Trump feels pressure and feels he needs to grab that so he has something good to say at the press conference”.

“That’s something I know that Europe and other world leaders are watching with some trepidation, that maybe he’ll be … too easy to agree to something coming from Putin.”

President Trump has said he could decide to have a solo press conference rather than speak to the media with President Putin if the “meeting [in Alaska] doesn’t end well”.

“I’m going to have a press conference. I don’t know if it’s going to be a joint. We haven’t even discussed it. I think it might be nice to have a joint and then separates,” Trump told Fox Radio.

“So, something like that will happen. Or the meeting doesn’t end well, I’ll just have a press conference and head out. I’ll head back to Washington.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, earlier confirmed plans for the leaders to hold a joint press conference after it had been announced by the Kremlin.

The Russian delegation has landed in Alaska ahead of the US-Russia summit on Friday.

According to Flightradar24, a real-time flight-tracking platform, an Ilyushin military plane known for its use as a Russian presidential aircraft touched down in Anchorage at 7.50am local time (4.50pm BST).

The summit between Trump and Putin is scheduled to begin at 8.30pm BST on Friday.

Trump cold-called a Norwegian minister and raised the prospect of winning the Nobel peace prize, according to reports in Norway.

Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian finance minister — and former secretary-general of Nato — confirmed the US president had called him, but only said the call covered tariffs and economic cooperation, declining to go into further details.

Trump has already been nominated for the prize by several countries, including Israel, Pakistan and Cambodia, for his role in brokering peace agreements and ceasefires. He has not shied away from claiming credit for these actions, including the cooling of tensions between India and Pakistan earlier this year.

During a meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, earlier this year, Trump said “they will never give me” the prize, adding: “It’s too bad. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.”

The Alaska summit could relate more to business than to peace, a former British ambassador to Ukraine has warned.

Leigh Turner, who was the ambassador in Kyiv from 2008 to 2012, told Times Radio: “The prospect of there being a good result to this summit happening on Friday in Anchorage, Alaska is pretty low.”

He added: “We seem to have President Trump very much hoping that some kind of vague business opportunities could come out of Russia if relations were normalised, if only these bloody Ukrainians would sort themselves out and accept that they’ve lost the war.

“That seems to be Trump’s approach and it’s interesting that Russia has included in its delegation [the] finance minister [Anton] Siluanov and the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, Kirill Dmitriev.”

Marco Rubio said preparations for the Alaska summit were going “very fast” as it had been put together quickly.

The US secretary of state said he believed Trump had spoken by phone to Putin four times and “felt it was important to now speak to him in person and look him in the eye and figure out what was possible and what wasn’t”.

Rubio added: “He sees an opportunity to talk about achieving peace, he’s going to pursue it. And we’ll know tomorrow at some point … probably very early in that meeting, whether something is possible or not. We hope it is.”

The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Putin would stop off in eastern Russia on his way to Alaska.

He commented that organising Putin’s trip to the United States in such a short time frame had been difficult since “the Americans have simply forgotten how to issue visas”.

Peskov added that Trump was demonstrating “an unprecedentedly unusual approach to solving the most difficult issues”, however, and that Putin appreciated this.

Though President Trump hopes to achieve a halt to the fighting in Ukraine, a comprehensive solution to the war will take longer, the US secretary of state said on Thursday.

Marco Rubio told reporters at the State Department: “To achieve a peace, I think we all recognize that there’ll have to be some conversation about security guarantees. There’ll have to be some conversation about … territorial disputes and claims and what they’re fighting over.”

“All these things will be part of a comprehensive thing. But I think the president’s hope is to achieve some stoppage of fighting so that those conversations can happen.”

The idea of “land swaps” with Russia has been rejected by Ukraine.

However, Trump told Fox News Radio on Thursday that there would have to be a “give and take” of boundaries between Kyiv and Moscow.

Zelensky urged Britain to join Nato’s Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) programme for equipment and munitions.

The Ukrainian president wrote on X: “It is important that, within the framework of the coalition of the willing, we should all be able to achieve effective formats for security co-operation.

“We also discussed [on Thursday and Friday] the continuation of support programmes for our army and our defence industry.

“Under any scenario, Ukraine will maintain its strength.

“Keir and I also talked about such mechanisms for weapons supplies as the PURL programme and I urged the UK to join.

“Of course, we also discussed our 100-year partnership agreement. Ukraine is preparing to ratify it in August and, as a result, we will be able to hold an expanded Ukraine–UK meeting.”

Any deal to end the war in Ukraine would come at a second meeting including President Zelensky, President Trump said, rather than at the Alaska summit on Friday with President Putin.

“The second meeting is going to be very, very important because that’s going to be a meeting where they make a deal,” Trump told Fox News Radio.

“And I don’t want to use the word ‘divvy’ things up. But you know, to a certain extent, it’s not a bad term, okay?”

President Trump has said he thinks President Putin is going to “make a deal” after the summit in Alaska but added that he did not expect to secure an “immediate ceasefire” in Ukraine.

The American president told Fox News Radio he had three locations in mind for a follow-up meeting with Putin and President Zelensky.

Trump suggested that his threat to impose further sanctions on Russia had played a role in Putin’s decision to meet him.

Asked to comment on potential economic incentives for Russia, he said he would “rather not say”.

The Kremlin warned on Thursday that it would be a mistake to predict the outcome of the summit in Alaska between President Trump and President Putin, the Interfax news agency reported.

The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there were no plans to sign any documents after the summit on Friday in the city of Anchorage.

When President Trump announced Alaska as the venue for this Friday’s summit with President Putin, no one was more delighted than the Republican governor of the vast Arctic state (Peter Conradi writes).

Mike Dunleavy, who assumed office in 2018, posted on X: “Alaska is the most strategic location in the world, sitting at the crossroads of North America and Asia, with the Arctic to our north and the Pacific to our south.

“A mere two miles separating Russia from Alaska, no other place plays a more vital role in our national defence, energy security, and Arctic leadership.”

Or as Sarah Palin, the 49th state’s most famous daughter, put it in a much mocked — but actually true — comment during her failed 2008 presidential campaign: “You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.”

• Read in full: Why is Alaska hosting Trump and Putin?

JD Vance, the US vice-president, has been playing golf at one of Donald Trump’s courses on the first morning of a five-day holiday in Scotland.

Vance landed at Prestwick airport in South Ayrshire on Wednesday evening before travelling to the luxury Carnell Estate near Kilmarnock.

On Thursday morning he was at the Trump Turnberry resort on the Ayrshire coast and spent time playing on the golf course.

It came after President Trump’s own visit to Scotland last month, when he split his stay between Turnberry and his golf resort in Aberdeenshire.

Vance was greeted by dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters when he arrived at the estate on Wednesday.

President Putin will try to distract Trump from Ukraine at the talks by offering him possible progress on nuclear arms control or something business-related, a senior eastern European official who requested anonymity has said.

Putin earlier signalled that Russia would raise the issue of nuclear arms control as part of a wide-ranging discussion on security when he would sit down with Trump for the first Russia-US summit since June 2021.

“We hope Trump won’t be fooled by the Russians, he understands all [these] dangerous things,” the official said.

“The only strategic goal for the Russians is not to receive new sanctions and to lift the sanctions that the US and others [imposed] previously. The Russians have no other big goals now. They think they will find a way to take all of Ukraine in one way or another.”

At least 1,674 civilian casualties were recorded in Ukraine in July, setting a record since the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion, UN human rights monitors announced.

The figure includes 286 civilians killed and 1,388 injured, topping a previous record in May 2022, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a statement on Wednesday.

Russia’s use of long-range weapons such as missiles and loitering munitions accounted for almost 40 per cent of the casualties, the UN report said, underscoring the intensifying attacks on Ukraine despite American efforts to broker a peace deal.

Most casualties occurred near Ukrainian front-line areas, a trend the monitors connected to Russia’s intensified offensives. Russia also carried out several deadly mass strikes against Kyiv — including a combined missile and drone strike on July 31 that killed 32 people and injured nearly 180 — and other major cities.

The United Nations has documented close to 14,000 civilians killed and more than 35,500 injured since the start of Russia’s invasion in February 2022, though the real figure is likely to be much higher due to the issues with verifying casualties in Russian-held regions.

The Alaska summit on Friday is expected to take place at Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson, an American military site in north Anchorage — and the Russian side has noted another significance of the location.

Yuri Ushakov, who will be part of the five-man Russian delegation, noted the meeting would take place near Fort Richardson National Cemetery, which among other war graves has the remains of nine Soviet pilots, two military personnel and two civilians who perished between 1942 and 1945 while ferrying aircraft from the United States to the Soviet Union.

“Thus, the meeting will unfold near a site of profound historical importance — one that underscores the wartime brotherhood-in-arms between our nations,” Ushakov said. “This symbolism is particularly resonant in this year, the year of the 80th anniversary of Victory over Nazi Germany and militarist Japan.”

Nearly 8,000 aircraft were donated to the USSR under the Lend-Lease Act, a US policy to provide military aid, including weapons, supplies and food, to its wartime allies. Some 300 Russian pilots flew the planes over the Bering Strait and on to the Eastern Front.

As well as the war in Ukraine and broader issues of peace and security, Kremlin officials have said they expect to discuss trade and economic issues with the American delegation at the summit in Alaska on Friday.

“An exchange of views on the further development of bilateral co-operation, particularly in the trade and economic spheres, is also expected,” Yuri Ushakov, President Putin’s foreign policy adviser, said.

“It is worth noting that this co-operation holds immense, yet regrettably underutilised, potential.”

Russia and Ukraine exchanged 84 prisoners of war from each side on Thursday, including some who President Zelensky said had been held for more than a decade in captivity.

Zelensky said those who were released included civilians from about the time that Kremlin-backed separatists started occupying parts of eastern Ukraine, eight years before Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022.

“Among the civilians released today are those held by Russia since 2014, 2016 and 2017,” the Ukrainian president said on Telegram, in a message with pictures of a group of men swathed in Ukrainian flags.

Russia’s defence ministry said on Telegram that the United Arab Emirates had mediated the exchange and that Russian service personnel released by Ukraine were currently in Belarus receiving “psychological and medical assistance”.

Sir Keir Starmer and President Zelensky agreed there was a “strong resolve” to secure peace in Ukraine during a breakfast meeting on Thursday, Downing Street said.

A No 10 spokesman said: “They had a private breakfast, where they discussed yesterday’s meetings.

“They agreed there had been a powerful sense of unity and a strong resolve to achieve a just and lasting peace in Ukraine.”

The statement said that talks in Alaska on Friday between President Trump and President Putin presented a viable chance to make progress on ending the war in Ukraine, “as long as Putin takes action to prove he is serious about peace”.

President Zelensky said he had a detailed discussion of possible security guarantees for Ukraine during a “productive meeting” with Sir Keir Starmer.

“We also discussed in considerable detail the security guarantees that can make peace truly durable if the United States succeeds in pressing Russia to stop the killings and engage in genuine, substantive diplomacy,” he wrote on X.

Zelensky added that the leaders also discussed investment in Ukrainian drone production.

President Putin has acknowledged the Trump administration’s “fairly energetic and sincere efforts to resolve the situation in Ukraine”.

The Russian president suggested he might be open to fresh nuclear arms control treaties with the Unites States.

Peace would be “strengthened” if at the next stage Russia and the US were to reach agreements “in the field of strategic offensive arms control”, according to comments broadcast by Russian state media.

Both Russia and the US have withdrawn from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, which was designed to limit the production of ballistic missiles.

“Putin did not rule out new agreements in the area of arms control in the future”, the Russian state-owned Tass news agency reported.

President Putin is “buying time” by meeting President Trump to “have a prolonged frozen conflict” and “grind down Ukraine”, a former military attaché to the US embassy in Moscow has said.

Brigadier General Peter Zwack, who served in the embassy during the Obama administration, said Putin was still focused on taking more territory and warned that a temporary ceasefire on Russia’s terms might only reignite the war later.

He told Times Radio: “The momentum on the battlefield right now is Putin’s and the longer the fighting goes, the Russians will be able to continue to get incremental gains into the territories they claim are theirs, which in theory enhances their negotiation status.

“Putin is buying time to continue the campaign to grind down the Ukrainian army and take more territories.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may be the main issue on the table when President Trump meets Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday (Catherine Philp writes).

But the choice of location — a territory bought from Russia in the 19th century and the United States’ only foothold in the far north — brings into focus a key arena for strategic competition in a new Cold War: the Arctic.

The Arctic is no longer a place of peaceful coexistence but intense strategic rivalry. It is dominated by Russia’s vast coastline, increasingly coveted by Beijing and home to vast newly accessible energy and mineral reserves.

Melting ice is opening up summer shipping routes close to the North Pole, giving Russia unprecedented leverage over global trade and a powerful enticement for Chinese co-operation with its global ambitions.

• Read in full: Tensions between Russia and the West mount in Arctic

Russia’s military has claimed to have captured more villages as part of its ongoing offensive in eastern Ukraine.

The defence ministry said troops had captured the settlements of Shcherbynivka and Andriivka-Klevtsove in the Donetsk region.

In a statement, it referred to the second settlement as Iskra, using the Russian name. The claims were not immediately verified.

Kremlin forces were reported to have made rapid but limited advances around the battleground town of Pokrovsk in recent days, forcing Ukraine to send reinforcements.

On Wednesday, the head of the Donetsk region ordered civilians with children to evacuate from about a dozen towns and villages under threat.

The Russian army’s gains on Tuesday were the biggest for a single 24-hour period in more than a year, according to the Institute for the Study of the War, although Ukraine’s military denied Russia had made significant breakthroughs.

President Zelensky has left Downing Street after holding talks with Sir Keir Starmer.

The Ukrainian leader walked out of No 10 and was accompanied by the prime minister to his waiting Range Rover.

The two allies exchanged a hug and a handshake as Zelensky waved goodbye and got into his vehicle.

The meeting between Starmer and Zelensky lasted about an hour.

The “best” outcome of President Trump’s meeting with President Putin would be for talks to fail and for the American president to realise his Russian counterpart cannot be negotiated with, a senior Ukrainian MP said.

Oleksandr Merezhko, the chair of Ukraine’s foreign affairs committee, said that “Putin has not changed” his goal to “destroy” Ukraine.

Merezhko told the Radio 4 Today programme: “Ideally the best scenario for us is of course when Mr Trump finally realises that he cannot deal with Putin.

“Putin is the only obstacle to peace and [Trump] will follow through on his numerous promises to implement sanctions, including secondary sanctions. This is the best and the most kind of reasonable scenario.”

The MP said he feared Putin would try to persuade Trump to blame Ukraine for not wanting a ceasefire “because Putin is a pathological liar and a provocateur”.

President Putin and President Trump will hold a joint press conference at the Alaska summit on Friday after meeting one-on-one and with their delegations, the Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov has said.

The talks are scheduled to start at 11.30am local time in Alaska (8.30pm BST).

Ushakov said on Thursday that the programme has been agreed by both sides and that “sensitive matters” will be discussed.

“It is probably obvious to everyone that the central topic will be the resolution of the Ukraine crisis,” Ushakov added.

The Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev and several senior ministers will accompany President Putin to the summit on Friday with Donald Trump in Alaska, it has been reported.

Dmitriev, 50, the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund, is officially Putin’s special envoy “for investment and economic co-operation with foreign countries”.

He was born in Kyiv when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, before moving to California as a teenager.

He studied at Stanford and Harvard universities and worked as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs and a consultant for McKinsey before returning to Russia.

He has previously held talks with Steve Witkoff, the US special envoy, and has spoken of possible business co-operation between Moscow and Washington.

The veteran foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, the defence minister, Andrey Belousov, and the finance minister, Anton Siluanov, will also be participating in the talks, Russian media has reported.

The former head of MI6 said he had seen “absolutely nothing” to suggest President Putin had changed his mind about conquering all of Ukraine.

Sir Alex Younger, who led the secret intelligence service between 2014 and 2020, told the Radio 4 Today programme: “I have seen absolutely nothing that indicates that Putin is in any way prepared to change course and resile from his aim of total subjugation.

“So it is hard to be optimistic, even though of course we desperately want a diplomatic solution. The risks are pretty high on the downside”.

He criticised Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s envoy who met Putin at the Kremlin last week, for being “out of his depth” and called his so-called “oven-ready deal” a “total fantasy”.

Witkoff was a lawyer and real estate investor before he entered Trump’s administration.

Sir Keir Starmer has welcomed Volodymyr Zelensky to Downing Street as Europe braces for Donald Trump’s face-to-face discussions with Vladimir Putin on Friday.

The Ukrainian president and the prime minister embraced and posed in front of No 10 with a handshake as Zelensky arrived in Westminster. A red carpet had been rolled out for his arrival.

The two leaders were later pictured in the Downing Street garden with a vase of sunflowers on the table, a flower that has become Ukraine’s national symbol of resilience during the war.

There is a “real risk” that President Trump may turn his back on Ukraine if he is unable to get President Putin to negotiate at the summit in Alaska on Friday, a retired US army lieutenant colonel has said.

Daniel Davis, an author and foreign policy analyst, told Times Radio that Trump had already signalled that the United States would leave Ukraine and Europe to continue fending off Russia if there was no end in sight to the war.

“There’s a real risk that [Trump] could just say, ‘You guys got it, good luck to you, we’re out of the game here.’

“And I think that is probably what scares a lot of Europe and I think it may be one of the more likely outcomes.”

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has arrived at Downing Street, where he was embraced by Sir Keir Starmer.

The leaders are meeting in person after a call between the prime minister, Zelensky, European leaders and President Trump on Wednesday.

The messaging app WhatsApp has accused the Kremlin of trying to prevent Russians accessing its services.

In a statement, the company owned by Meta, said: “WhatsApp is private, end-to-end encrypted and defies government attempts to violate people’s right to secure communication, which is why Russia is trying to block it from over 100 million Russian people.

“We will keep doing all we can to make end-to-end encrypted communication available to people everywhere, including in Russia.”

President Zelensky has appeared reluctant to accept any deal requiring his country to surrender territory.

But in addition to Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014, there are four territories that are likely to feature in negotiations: Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

We explore four scenarios of what could happen if President Putin and Zelensky agreed to ‘swap’ land.

• Read in full: What are the options for Ukraine’s border? Maps explained

As President Trump prepares to meet President Putin in Alaska on Friday, Europe is agonising over one of the few strong cards it holds on the war in Ukraine: more than €260 billion in frozen Russian state assets.

Brussels has been tentatively skimming off a share of the interest on these holdings and funnelling the money into aid to Kyiv. President Zelensky and his more ardent supporters in the West have called for the assets to be seized outright.

• Read in full: How Europe can hit Russia where it hurts — and why it probably won’t

The new commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps has broad shoulders and a thick skin (Maxim Tucker writes).

Hated and feared by President Putin as the face of Ukrainian nationalism, Colonel Andriy Biletsky, 46, has survived attempts to end his life and allegations of neo-Nazism that would end most careers. Yet he now bears responsibility for the lives of 20,000 soldiers, having risen to command despite having no formal military education.

He has been tasked with holding more than a tenth of the front line, with five brigades he is forging into a corps motivated by a strong nationalist ideology, he tells The Times in Kyiv in his first sit-down interview with an international media outlet for more than a decade.

• Read in full: Putin fears him — 20,000 Ukrainians want to fight for him

Britain has scaled back plans for a military peacekeeping force in Ukraine, but is promising “strong sanctions” to keep pressure on Russia to do a deal.

After a video meeting with President Trump and EU leaders on Wednesday, Sir Keir Starmer said the UK and other European nations had credible military plans to deploy a “reassurance force” to Ukraine once a ceasefire had been agreed.

British military chiefs have given up on the idea of a 30,000-strong contingent to protect Ukraine’s ports and cities and are said to be proposing a more “realistic mission” involving air support.

• Read in full: Britain plans scaled-back ‘reassurance force’ in Ukraine

Russia and the US discussed a model for ending the war in Ukraine that mirrors Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, The Times has been told.

Russia would have military and economic control of occupied Ukraine under its own governing body, imitating Israel’s de facto rule of Palestinian territory seized from Jordan in 1967.

The idea was raised in discussions between Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s peace envoy, and his Russian counterparts weeks ago, according to a source close to the US national security council.

The story was dismissed as “total fake news” by Anna Kelly, the deputy White House press secretary.

• Read David Charter’s exclusive report in full: US and Russia ‘propose West Bank-style occupation of Ukraine’

Russia’s defence ministry claimed on Thursday to have carried out successful strikes against missile plants, weapons design bureaus and rocket fuel producers in Ukraine.

Highlighting attacks that took place in July, the ministry said Russian forces had destroyed some Western missile defence systems, including Patriot launchers and fire control radar in the Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy regions, which had been deployed to defend the plants.

“An attempt by the Kyiv regime, together with its Western partners, to organise the production of missiles to carry out attacks deep into the territory of the Russian Federation was thwarted,” the ministry said.

Ukraine and Russia fired drones and missiles into each other’s territory overnight into Thursday, continuing cross-border attacks.

Drone strikes by Ukraine wounded at least three people and sparked fires in two southern Russian regions, including at an oil refinery, officials said.

“The debris from the attack caused oil products to spill and catch fire at the Volgograd oil refinery,” Andrei Bocharov, the governor of the Volgograd region, said in a statement on Telegram.

The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said a Ukrainian drone had struck a car in the centre of the region’s capital, setting it alight and wounding three people.

Trump warned of “severe consequences” for Russia if Putin rejects a ceasefire in Ukraine.

He said he had already tried to dissuade the Russian president from firing missiles and drones at Ukrainian cities while the ceasefire talks were in progress.

“I’ve had a lot of good conversations with him,” he said. “Then I go home and I see that a rocket hit a nursing home, or a rocket hit an apartment building, and people are laying dead … So I guess the answer to that is no, because I’ve had this conversation.”

President Trump has suggested he will hold a meeting with President Putin and President Zelensky “almost immediately” after his summit with the Russian leader in Alaska on Friday.

Trump floated the possibility of the three-way meeting during an event at the Kennedy Center in Washington on Wednesday.

“There’s a very good chance we will have a second meeting that will be more productive than the first,” he said. “If the first one goes OK, we will have a quick second one. I would like to do it almost immediately, and we’ll have a quick second meeting between President Putin and President Zelensky and myself if they’d like to have me there.”

Sir Keir Starmer is due to welcome President Zelensky to Downing Street in a show of support for the Ukrainian leader.

On Wednesday the prime minister said there was a “viable” chance for a ceasefire, after a call with President Trump, Zelensky and other European leaders.

Speaking to the “coalition of the willing”, he said: “As I’ve said personally to President Trump, for three and a bit years this conflict has been going on and we haven’t got anywhere near the prospect of actually a viable solution, a viable way, of bringing it to a ceasefire. And now we do have that chance because of the work that the president has put in.”