With no deal, Trump threatens Russia with more sanctions

US President Donald Trump renewed a threat to impose sanctions on Russia on Friday if there is no progress toward a peaceful settlement in Ukraine in two weeks, showing frustration at Moscow a week after his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska.

“I’m going to make a decision as to what we do and it’s going to be, it’s going to be a very important decision, and that’s whether or not it’s massive sanctions or massive tariffs or both, or we do nothing and say it’s your fight,” Trump said.

He said he was unhappy about Russia’s strike on an American factory in Ukraine this week, which caused a fire that injured some of the facility’s employees.

“I’m not happy about it, and I’m not happy about anything having to do with that war,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

Russia on Friday ruled out an immediate meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, as diplomatic tension with the Ukrainian president escalated and US mediation efforts appeared to stall.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said “no meeting” between Vladimir Putin and Zelensky was planned, as Nato chief Mark Rutte visited Kyiv, largely to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine.

Lavrov also poured cold water on hopes for direct Putin-Zelensky talks to resolve the conflict, now in its fourth year, by questioning the Ukrainian president’s legitimacy and repeating the Kremlin’s maximalist claims.

“There is no meeting planned,” Lavrov said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker.” Lavrov told the US broadcaster Putin was “ready to meet Zelensky” as soon as an agenda was prepared, adding that the agenda was “not ready at all.”

Trump started the week declaring a diplomatic breakthrough in his bid to prod Moscow and Kyiv closer to peace, announcing he had begun arranging for direct talks between Putin and Ukraine’s Zelensky.

Four days later, the Republican president’s optimism has diminished. Russia’s top diplomat made it clear Friday that Putin won’t meet with Zelenskyy until the Ukrainians agree to some of Moscow’s longstanding demands to end the conflict. It’s a stinging setback for Trump, who had been touting his diplomatic blitz as resulting in indisputable momentum for a deal to halt a conflict he vowed as a candidate to end on Day One in office.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday that countries of the Global South should push Russia toward making peace in its war with Ukraine, including by helping bring Russian leader Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table.

“I reaffirmed my readiness for any format of meeting with the head of Russia. However, we see that Moscow is once again trying to drag everything out even further,” Zelenskiy wrote on X after speaking with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.

“It is important that the Global South sends relevant signals and pushes Russia toward peace.”

RUSSIA TAKES VILLAGES: Russia on Saturday said its forces in east Ukraine had taken two villages in the Donetsk region, upping military pressure on the ground as world leaders struggle to broker an end to the conflict.

Russian forces are slowly advancing in the embattled eastern region, grinding closer to Kyiv’s key defensive line in costly metre-for-metre battles.

Moscow’s defence ministry said on Telegram that Russian forces captured the villages of Sredneye and Kleban-Byk.

The taking of Kleban-Byk would mark a further advance towards Kostiantynivka -- a key fortified town on the road to Kramatorsk, where a major Ukrainian logistics base is located.

On Friday, Russia said its troops had captured three villages in the Donetsk region it claimed to have annexed in September 2022.

ITALY AMBASSADOR SUMMONED: France summoned the Italian ambassador after Italy’s deputy prime minister challenged the French president for suggesting that European soldiers be deployed in Ukraine in a post-war settlement, a French diplomatic source said on Saturday.

Asked earlier this week to comment on French President Emmanuel Macron’s appeals to deploy European soldiers in Ukraine after any settlement with Russia, Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini used a Milanese dialect phrase loosely translatable as “get lost”.

“You go there if you want. Put your helmet on, your jacket, your rifle and you go to Ukraine,” he told reporters, referring to Macron.

Salvini, the populist leader of the right-wing League party and also Italy’s transport minister in the nationalist, conservative government led by Giorgia Meloni, has repeatedly criticized Macron, especially over Ukraine.

The Italian ambassador was summoned on Friday, the diplomatic source said, marking the latest in a series of diplomatic clashes between Paris and Rome before and after Meloni took power in 2022.

Ukraine wants Western security guarantees to deter any postwar Russian attack, and U.S. and European officials are scrambling to come up with detailed proposals of how that might work. But Lavrov said earlier this week that making security arrangements for Ukraine without Moscow’s involvement was pointless.

Agencies