Donald Trump has been urged to pressure Russia with further sanctions, after Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky warned Vladimir Putin is “trying to buy time” to continue his war.
The US president insisted progress had been made after his two-hour call with the Russian president on Monday.
But despite Mr Trump saying negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow would begin “immediately”, the Kremlin quickly poured cold water on the US president’s optimistic statements, saying “there are no deadlines and there can’t be any”.
The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said Russia’s failure to negotiate in good faith should trigger threatened US sanctions.
“We really haven’t seen, you know, the pressure on Russia from these talks,” she told reporters.
Mr Trump, meanwhile, repeated his threat to abandon efforts to broker peace, insisting that he has a “red line in my head” on when he will walk away and saying: “This is not my war.”
Meanwhile, heavy fighting continued along the front line, with Ukraine reporting 177 combat clashes and claiming to have inflicted more than 1,000 casualties upon Russia over the past 24 hours.
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