Washington: US President Donald Trump confirmed on Thursday that he does not expect progress in efforts to resolve the crisis in Ukraine until after his meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, who is not scheduled to attend scheduled talks with Kyiv in Istanbul. “Nothing will happen until Putin and I meet,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One while en route from Qatar to the UAE. “Obviously, he was going to go (to Turkey), he thought I’d be there. But if I wasn’t there, he wouldn’t go.” Trump added, “But we have to solve the problem because a lot of people are dying.”

According to National Iraqi News Agency, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Ankara on Thursday after inviting Putin to attend talks scheduled to be held in Istanbul. Putin had proposed direct talks, the first since the spring of 2022, to find a settlement to the crisis that began in February of that year.

The Russian presidency (the Kremlin) announced on Thursday that President Vladimir Putin would not attend the Russian-Ukrainian talks in Turkey to reach an agreement to end the war between the two countries, which has been ongoing for more than three years. Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesman, denied during a press conference that the Russian President would participate in the Istanbul talks with the Ukrainian side.