US President Donald Trump said on Friday that he will meet ' very shortly' with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the war in Ukraine and that he will announce the location soon. ' We're going to be announcing later, and we're going to have a meeting with Russia," Trump told reporters at the White House.

If it happens, the meeting would be the first US-Russia summit since 2021, when former President Joe Biden met Putin in Geneva. It would be a significant milestone toward Trump's effort to end the war, although there's no guarantee it would stop the fighting since Moscow and Kyiv remain far apart on their conditions for peace.

The president's comments came as Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield expressed little hope for a diplomatic solution to the war and Trump's deadline arrived on Friday for the Kremlin to make peace. Exasperated that Putin did not heed his calls to stop bombing Ukrainian cities, Trump almost two weeks ago moved up his ultimatum to impose additional sanctions on Russia and introduce secondary tariffs targeting countries that buy Russian oil if the Kremlin did not move toward a settlement.