Trump says no Ukraine agreement after Putin talks as he advises Zelenskyy to ‘make a deal’ – live

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Norway’s foreign minister, Espen Barth Eide, says it is too early to tell if the meeting resulted in any progress.

“We must continue to put pressure on Russia, and even increase it, to give the clear signal to Russia that it must pay the price (for its invasion of Ukraine),” Eide told reporters in Oslo.

Earlier this month Eide had said on X that he welcomed Trump’s “initiative to bring Russia’s illegal war to an end”. But had added: “Nobody wants peace more than Ukraine. A dignified peace must be a lasting and just peace. No decision about Ukraine should be made without Ukraine. Its sovereignty & territorial integrity must be respected.”

As Trump and Putin met in Alaska, Russia launched 85 attack drones and a ballistic missile targeting Ukraine’s territory, Ukraine’s Air Force said on Saturday.

Frontline territories in the Sumy, Donetsk, Chernihiv, and Dnipropetrovsk regions were targeted in the overnight strikes, the air force said on the Telegram messaging app. It said its air defence units destroyed 61 of the drones. The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said in its daily morning report that 139 clashes had taken place on the front line over the past day.

Meanwhile Russian media, citing the country’s defence ministry, said Russia’s air defence systems intercepted and destroyed 29 Ukrainian drones overnight over various Russian regions, including 10 downed over the Rostov region.

David Smith, the Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief, has been in Anchorage for the meeting, which provided quite a bit of material for his political sketch:

That was the moment he knew it was true love.

Donald Trump turned to gaze at Vladimir Putin as the Russian president publicly endorsed his view that, had Trump been president instead of Joe Biden, the war in Ukraine would never have happened.

“Today President Trump was saying that if he was president back then, there would be no war, and I’m quite sure that it would indeed be so,” Putin said. “I can confirm that.”

Vladimir, you complete me, Trump might have replied. To hell with all those Democrats, democrats, wokesters, fake news reporters and factcheckers. Here is a man who speaks my authoritarian alternative facts language.

The damned doubters had been worried about Friday’s big summit at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, a cold war-era airbase under a big sky and picturesque mountains on the outskirts of Anchorage, Alaska.

They feared that it might resemble Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler in Munich 1938, or Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin carving up the world for the great powers at the Yalta Conference in 1945.

It was worse than that.

You can read Smith’s full dispatch here.

“Sickening. Shameful. And in the end, useless.”

The Kyiv Independent has published a blistering editorial on the Trump Putin meeting.

Trump didn’t get what he wanted. But Putin? He sure did.

From the moment he stepped off the plane on US soil, the Russian dictator was beaming.

No longer an international pariah, he was finally getting accepted – and respected — by the leader of the free world. Trump’s predecessor once called Putin a murderer; Trump offered him a king’s welcome.

The English-language Ukrainian outlet’s editorial compared the “king’s welcome” for Putin to Trump’s hostile reception of Zelenskyy in the Oval Office just six months ago.

“Ukraine’s president endured a public shaming. Russia’s was pampered. Both episodes were disgraceful,” it said.

“Trump fails to grasp that Putin isn’t transactional about Ukraine – he is messianic. He wants Ukraine for Russia, period. For Putin and his inner circle, Ukraine’s independence is an accident, and they are correcting it.”

“Trump did not lose, but Putin clearly won,” former US ambassador to the UN and national security adviser John Bolton has told CNN.

“Trump didn’t come away with anything except more meetings. Putin has, I think, gone a long way to reestablishing the relationship, which I’ve always believed is his key goal. He has escaped sanctions, he’s not facing a ceasefire, the next meeting is not set, [Ukrainian president] Zelenskyy was not told any of this before this press conference. It’s far from over but I’d say Putin achieved most of what he wanted and Trump achieved very little.”

“And I would say one other thing. Trump looked very tired up there,” Bolton added. “Not disappointed, tired. And we’ll have to reflect on what that means.”

The Trump-Putin meeting drew some crowds of onlookers Anchorage.

Protesters unveiled a massive Ukrainian flag, in support of the country that Putin invaded in 2022 and has waged war on since.

Elsewhere, Trump supporters gathered by the roadside to welcome the US president.

While in Alaska, Putin made a couple of side visits, according to Russia’s foreign ministry.

He laid flowers at the graves of Soviet soldiers At the Fort Richardson Memorial Cemetery he laid flowers at the graves of Soviet pilots and sailors who died during the second world war. He also met with Archbishop Alexei, of the Orthodox Church in America Diocese of Alaska, perhaps an attempt to remind people that Alaska used to be part of Russia.

Trump hand delivered a letter from his wife, Melania, to Putin at the meeting, White House officials have told Reuters. The letter raised the plight of children abducted during the war in Ukraine, they said, without providing further details.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been abducted, taken to Russia or Russian-occupied territories without the consent of families or guardians, which Ukraine has called a war crime that meets the UN treaty definition of genocide.

Putin has been indicted by the Criminal Court for the alleged war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.

“There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Putin bears individual criminal responsibility,” the charge says.

Moscow has previous said it has been protecting vulnerable children from a war zone.

Melania Trump was not on the Alaska trip, however she is emerging as one of the strongest influences on her husband, whose inner circle tends to shift as people fall in and out of favour.

Trump has credited the first lady’s scepticism with sharpening his partial rethink about Putin. At a meeting with the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, on 15 July he said: “I go home. I tell the first lady: ‘I spoke with Vladimir today. We had a wonderful conversation.’ She said: ‘Oh really? Another city was just hit.’”

At another White House event that same day, he said: “I’d get home, I’d say: ‘First lady, I had the most wonderful talk with Vladimir. I think we’re finished.’ And then I’ll turn on the television, or she’ll say to me one time: ‘Wow, that’s strange because they just bombed a nursing home.’

For more on the role Melania is playing in shaping her husband’s politics, read this in depth feature from the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour.

Interim summary

We will continue to gather reaction and try to make sense of what happened in Anchorage, Alaska on Friday. In the meantime, here are some of the day’s developments so far:

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin met on a red carpet laid down for them at a US military base in the former Russian territory of Alaska, and spent about three hours in private talks, with top foreign policy aides, aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. Ukrainian observers were horrified that Trump laid out a red carpet for Putin, and even applauded him.

The meeting, billed as a summit, came to an end much earlier than scheduled, after the first of what was supposed to have been two rounds of talks.

Reporters were summoned for what was billed as a joint news conference, but were instead treated to a pair of brief statements that lasted, in total, 12 minutes. After Putin claimed that some sort of agreement had been reached, Trump said that there had been ‘no deal’ and then abruptly ended the event, taking no questions.

A Fox News reporter called it “really stunning” that Putin spoke first in the event.

In a post-summit interview with his supporter Sean Hannity, Trump said that the meeting with Putin had been “a 10” and suggested that Putin “spoke very sincerely” about his desire to end the war in Ukraine.

Trump also claimed to Hannity that Putin, the Russian autocrat who has jailed, exiled and killed political rivals who could challenge him in elections, told him that the 2020 US presidential election “was rigged” and “you can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting.’”

In 2024 debate, Harris told Trump that Putin 'would eat you for lunch' in Ukraine talks

Eleven months ago, during a presidential debate, Kamala Harris scoffed at Donald Trump’s claim that he would be able to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, based on his relationship with Vladimir Putin.

After Trump claimed that he would get the war ended even before taking office, as president-elect, Harris shot back.

“I believe the reason that Donald Trump says that this war would be over within 24 hours is because he would just give it up,” Harris said. “You would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch”.

In the end, when Trump did meet Putin as president on Friday, seven months into his second term, their discussion of ending the war went so badly that even the planned working lunch with the leaders and their aides was canceled.

That meant that the Russians went home without tasting the filet mignon the president had planned to serve them, in sharp contrast to the last summit between the two presidents, in Helsinki in 2018, when lunch was served.

A photograph of that 2018 lunch, taken by the New York Times photographer Doug Mills, is also a reminder of how different the make-up of Trump’s delegation was then.

In 2018, Trump sat down to lunch with Putin flanked by: John Kelly, his chief of staff; Fiona Hill, his Russia adviser; Mike Pompeo, his secretary of state; Jon Huntsman, his ambassador to Russia; and John Bolton, his national security adviser. Every one of those former aides subsequently left Trump’s inner circle and openly denounced him.

By contrast, Putin was joined at the 2018 lunch by: his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov; his foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov; and his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. All of them were at his side in Alaska on Friday.

Trump claims Putin told him 2020 election 'was rigged'

Donald Trump claimed in an interview with Sean Hannity on Friday that Vladimir Putin, the Russian autocrat who has jailed, exiled and killed political rivals who could challenge him in elections, told him at their summit meeting that the 2020 US presidential election “was rigged” through the widespread use of postal voting that year.

“Vladimir Putin said something, one of the most interesting things, he said, ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting,’” Trump said. “He said, ‘No country has mail-in voting. It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.’”

“We talked about 2020, he said: ‘You won that election by so much,’” Trump added.

A short time later, after making the false claim that California’s system of sending ballots to voters opened the door to fraud, Trump said: “Vladimir Putin, smart guy, said ‘You can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting.’”

There is no evidence that voter fraud played any role in Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, but elections in Putin’s Russia are notoriously dishonest, with rampant cheating by the authorities documented by pro-democracy activists.

It is impossible to know if Putin did make these remarks, but Trump has a habit of putting his own words in the mouths of other people.

In the interview, he also claimed that Putin told him that the US was “dead” under his predecessor, Joe Biden, and was now “as hot as a pistol”.

Trump went on to repeat his claim that “the king of Saudi Arabia” told him the exact same thing in May, when he visited the country. But Trump did not meet the elderly king of Saudi Arabia during his visit.

Trump says his advice to Zelenskyy is 'make a deal'

Asked by Sean Hannity what advice he would give to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy after meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, Donald Trump said he would tell him to “make a deal”, to end the war.

He made no reference to any way in which Ukraine could make a deal with Russia while under occupation and bombardment.

Trump also repeated his familiar lie, debunked by the Guardian six months ago, that the US had given $350bn to Ukraine for its defense, while Europe had given just $100bn.

'Wars are very bad; I seem to have an ability to end them', Trump boasts after failure to broker Ukraine ceasefire

In an interview with Sean Hannity, recorded in the room where he just failed to convince Vladimir Putin to stop attacking Ukraine, Donald Trump just boasted that he has a special talent for ending wars.

“Wars are very bad, I seem to have an ability to end them,” Trump said.

The president was responding to a comment from Hannity, who praised Trump for playing a role in tamping down a series of largely dormant global conflicts in the past six months. Neither man mentioned that Trump had promised on the campaign trail that he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours if elected.

Trump boasts to Hannity that meeting with Putin was 'a 10'

Donald Trump’s post-summit interview with Sean Hannity is being broadcast now on Fox.

Trump began by repeating his claim that he “always had a great relationship with President Putin”, but cooperation between the United States and Russia was made impossible by the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which he refers to as a “hoax”.

He then said that he did have a chance to speak privately to Putin, after their brief, 12-minute news conference. Putin “spoke very sincerely”, Trump said about his desire to end the war in Ukraine. Trump did not mention that the war began with Putin’s decision to seize Ukrainian territory in 2014, after his ally was deposed as president of Ukraine in a popular uprising. It then intensified in 2022 when Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Asked by Hannity to rate the meeting on a scale of one to 10, Trump replied that it was “a 10” because it showed that the leaders of the two nuclear-armed nations could cooperate.

“It’s good when two big powers get along,” Trump said.

Hannity then pressed Trump to reveal what Putin told him about why he thought the war in Ukraine would not have started if Trump was president. Trump demurred, but said that he could say in his own words that the reason was that Biden was grossly incompetent.

'Next time in Moscow': Putin invites Trump to Russia for next round of talks

At the end of Donald Trump’s brief and somewhat defeated-sounding remarks after his meeting with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president extended an invitation to his US counterpart to hold the next round of talks in the Russian capital.

“Again, Mr President, I’d like to thank you very much, and we’ll speak to you very soon and probably see you again very soon,” Trump said. “Thank you very much, Vladimir.”

“Next time in Moscow,” Putin replied, chuckling.

“Oh, that’s an interesting one,” Trump said. “I’ll get a little heat on that one, but I, uh, I could see it possibly happening.”

'I won't be happy if I walk away without some form of a ceasefire', Trump tells Fox en route to summit,

On his way to Alaska, Donald Trump told Fox News anchor Bret Baier that his goal for the talks with Vladimir Putin was to get the Russian president to agree to a ceasefire.

“So when you talk about deals, it’s all I do my whole life, I do deals, you never know, you don’t like to have too many expectations,” Trump told Baier in an interview recorded on Air Force One that was broadcast on Friday.

“But we’re going to go and find out. I’d like to see a ceasefire. I wouldn’t be thrilled if I didn’t get it, but everyone says, ‘You’re not going to get the ceasefire, it’ll take place on the second meeting’, but I’m not going to be happy with that.

“I won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of a ceasefire.”

After summit ends with a whimper, Trump turns to Sean Hannity to make sense of it all

The White House pool reporter tells us that Donald Trump “is currently doing a previously announced interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News”.

That interview, with an opinion host who is a strong supporter of the president and has campaigned for him, is scheduled to be broadcast on Hannity’s show in just over an hour.

The interview was billed by the network as an exclusive look behind the scenes at what was supposed to have been a meeting of historic importance, perhaps comparable to Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China to meet chairman Mao Zedong. At the very least, Trump said that he hoped to convince the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to agree to an immediate ceasefire in his war on Ukraine.

Now that Trump’s talks with Putin have failed to bring the war in Ukraine to an end, a conflict that he promised on the campaign trail he could end in 24 hours, his discussion with Hannity will no doubt be a good deal less celebratory.