'I'm not going to be wasting my time' — Trump rules out Putin meeting without Ukraine peace progress

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Oct. 25 that he does not plan to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin unless he sees a clear path to a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine.

"We're going to have to know that we're going to make a deal. I'm not going to be wasting my time," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. "I've always had a great relationship with Vladimir Putin, but this has been very disappointing."

Trump said he had expected peace in Ukraine to be easier to achieve than other diplomatic breakthroughs. "I thought this would have gone long before peace in the Middle East… if you look at India and Pakistan, I could say almost any one of the deals that I've already done, I thought would have been more difficult than Russia and Ukraine. But it didn't work out that way. There's a lot of hatred between the two — between Zelensky and Putin. There's tremendous hatred."

Two days earlier, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said a Trump–Putin summit remains "not completely off the table."

"The President has also long expressed his frustration with Vladimir Putin and, frankly, both sides of this war. He’s always said in order to negotiate a good peace deal, both sides need to be interested in a good peace deal," Leavitt said on Oct. 23. She added that Trump has seen "not enough interest and enough action" from Russia to move toward peace.

"The President and the entire administration hopes that one day that could happen again, but we want to make sure that there’s a tangible, positive outcome out of that meeting, and that it’s a good use of the President’s time," she added.

Leavitt’s comments came a day after Washington imposed its first sanctions on Moscow since Trump took office. On Oct. 22, the U.S. sanctioned Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, as well as their subsidiaries.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the measures aim to pressure the Kremlin into accepting a ceasefire. "Now is the time to stop the killing and for an immediate ceasefire," he said.

Russia is preparing Ukrainian children from occupied territories to fight in its war

High-ranking Russian officers are running military training programs for Ukrainian children from occupied territories and overseeing a system of youth militarization, an investigation by the Kyiv Indepndent has found. The programs are organized by the Warrior Center for Military and Patriotic Education — a network created in 2022 by direct order of Vladimir Putin. An investigation by the Kyiv Independent’s War Crimes Unit revealed that Ukrainian teenagers from occupied parts of Kherson, Zapori

The Kyiv IndependentOlesia Bida