US president warns of ‘massive’ sanctions and tariffs; Zelenskyy accuses Moscow of trying to avoid meeting between him and Putin. What we know on day 1,277

Donald Trump has renewed a threat to impose sanctions on Russia if there is no progress toward a peaceful settlement in Ukraine in two weeks , showing frustration at Moscow a week after his meeting with 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,” the US president said on Friday. 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.

At the same White House event where he mentioned possible sanctions, he showed a photograph of his meeting with Putin on the red carpet in Alaska, saying Putin wanted to attend the World Cup 2026 football tournament in the US . “I’m going to sign this for him. But I was sent one, and I thought you would like to see it, it’s a man named Vladimir Putin, who I believe will be coming, depending on what happens. He may be coming, and he may not, depending on what happens,” Trump said.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, meanwhile said Russia was doing everything it could to prevent a meeting between him and Putin . Zelenskyy has repeatedly called for Putin to meet him, saying it is the only way to negotiate an end to the war. He accused Russia of stalling. “The meeting is one of the components of how to end the war,” he said on Friday at a press conference in Kyiv with Nato secretary general Mark Rutte. “And since they don’t want to end it, they will look for space to [avoid it].”

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, told NBC there was no agenda for such a summit. “Putin is ready to meet with Zelenskyy when the agenda would be ready for a summit. And this agenda is not ready at all,” he said.

During a visit to a nuclear research centre on Friday, Putin said Trump’s leadership qualities would help restore US-Russia relations . “With the arrival of President Trump, I think that a light at the end of the tunnel has finally loomed. And now we had a very good, meaningful and frank meeting in Alaska,” Putin said.

Ukraine has attacked a key pumping station on the Druzhba oil pipeline bringing fuel to Europe from Russia , Deborah Cole reports. The attack knocked out supplies to Hungary and Slovakia, the only remaining EU member states still receiving Russian oil. The Hungarian and Slovakian governments wrote to the European Commission after the attack, saying that Russian oil supplies could be suspended for at least five days owing to the damage. “The physical and geographical reality is that without this pipeline, the safe supply of our countries is simply not possible,” their foreign ministers, Péter Szijjártó and Juraj Blanár, said in a letter.

The Russian warlord and businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin looked “doomed” after his failed mutiny and told his mother he expected to die in the days before his private plane crash , Pjotr Sauer reports. Prigozhin, the founder of the notorious Wagner mercenary group, died when his business jet went down in the summer of 2023, two months after his fighters briefly seized control of the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and advanced towards Moscow in a short-lived rebellion against Russia’s military leadership. “When I last saw him, he looked doomed,” said Violetta Prigozhina, 85, in an interview with the Russian outlet Fontanka.