A meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump has been agreed upon, revealed officials in Kremlin on Thursday. This comes close on the heels of a new Gallup poll that has found that Ukrainians are increasingly eager for a settlement that ends the fight against Russia's invasion. The last publicly reported in-person meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin was on July 16, 2018, at the Helsinki Summit in Finland.
Putin's foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov said the two sides were working on setting up a meeting and venue has been agreed upon.
It would be a significant milestone in the more than three-year-old war, though there is no promise that such a meeting would lead to the end of fighting, since Russia and Ukraine remain far apart on their demands.
Support for continuing the fight has waned in Ukraine. The enthusiasm for a negotiated deal is a sharp reversal from 2022—the year that the war began—when Gallup found that about three-quarters of Ukrainians wanted to keep fighting until victory. Now only about one-quarter hold that view with support for continuing the war declining steadily across all regions and demographic groups.
The findings were based on samples of 1,000 or more respondents, aged 15 and older, living in Ukraine. Some territories under entrenched Russian control, representing about 10 per cent of the population, were excluded from surveys conducted after 2022, due to lack of access. Since the start of the full-scale war, Russia's relentless pounding of urban areas behind the front line has led to the killing of more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians, according to the United Nations.
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On the 1,000-kilometre front line snaking from northeast to southeast Ukraine, where tens of thousands of troops on both sides have died, Russia's bigger army is slowly capturing more land. The poll came out on the eve of US President Donald Trump's Friday deadline for Russia to stop the killing or face heavy economic sanctions.
In the new Gallup survey, conducted in early July, seven in 10 Ukrainians said their country should seek to negotiate a settlement as soon as possible. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last month renewed his offer to meet Russia's Vladimir Putin, but his overture was rebuffed as Russia sticks to its demands. Most Ukrainians do not expect lasting peace anytime soon, the poll found. Only about one-quarter say it's “very” or “somewhat” likely that active fighting will end within the next 12 months, while about seven in 10 think it's “somewhat” or “very” unlikely that active fighting will be over in the next year.
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