Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he will be waiting in the Turkish capital, Ankara, to hold a meeting on May 15 with President Vladimir Putin, and will only meet face-to-face with his Russian counterpart, whose participation is still up in the air, and not other Russian officials.

Zelenskyy told reporters in Kyiv on May 13 that he has invited US President Donald Trump, currently on a trip to the Middle East, to the talks, as the White House and Ukraine’s European allies push for an end to the war, the largest and deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II.

Trump, speaking in Riyadh after signing “historic” agreements with the Saudi government, said that potential talks between Ukraine and Russia in Turkey this week “could produce some pretty good results.”

He said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio would be among the top US officials traveling to Turkey for the talks on ending Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Zelenskyy, however, has made it clear that Putin must be at the meetings for any progress to be made.

“It is with [Putin] that I must negotiate a cease-fire, as only he can decide on it,” Zelenskyy said, adding that if the Russian leader decides to travel to Istanbul — where the meeting was initially expected to take place — then he would meet him there.

“If he [Putin] takes the step to say he is ready for a cease-fire then it opens the way to discussing all the elements to end the war,” he added.

Over the weekend, Putin proposed talks in Istanbul on May 15, to which Zelenskyy agreed. However, the Kremlin has not yet confirmed the Russian leader’s participation.

“As soon as the president considers it necessary, we will make an announcement,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow, adding Russia continues to “move forward with preparations for the talks.”

The European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said on May 13 that Putin wouldn’t “dare” to show up at the meeting as “Russia is clearly playing games, trying to buy time.”

“I don’t think they (Russia) are interested in peace. They are still bombing Ukraine. If they were interested in peace, they could stop right now,” Kallas told reporters at a democracy summit in Copenhagen.

Sources told US media outlets that senior Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Keith Kellogg will travel to Istanbul for the talks, while Rubio is scheduled to be in Turkey for a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in addition to the talks.

In the past, Putin has questioned Zelenskyy’s legitimacy.

“If Putin shows up in Istanbul, it would already be a defeat. Simply entering negotiations with Zelenskyy would signal a loss for him — especially if he arrives under pressure, to a summit he clearly never planned to attend,” Alexander Friedman, a Russian political observer and historian, told Current Time on May 13.

“Most likely, Russia won’t be able to offer anything that would satisfy the Americans, the Ukrainians, or the Europeans. That could mark the end of the negotiations altogether.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held talks on May 12 with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan to discuss Moscow’s direct talks with Kyiv, a proposal that came from Putin at the weekend, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

The planned direct talks would be the first between the two sides since March 2022, in the early days of the full-scale war launched by Russia the previous month.

Oleh Saakyan, a political commentator who spoke with Current Time, said both Ukraine and Europe know they cannot trust Putin and that he likely has begun preparing a new stage of the war and strengthened his positions through talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping during his visit to Moscow last week.

“The whole cease-fire and talks spectacle has been staged for one spectator — Trump — in order to expose Putin as someone you can’t do business with,” said Saakyan, who also cast doubt on the prospect of the Russian president traveling to Istanbul or any agreements coming from there.

“The focus is likely now to shift toward the trans-Atlantic axis and the readiness of the West to actually and jointly impose sanctions on Russia,” he said. “This is key now, and it will greatly shape the future of talks.”

Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the international affairs committee of the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia’s parliament, told the Izvestia media outlet that the talks between Moscow and Kyiv can move further than they did in the 2022 discussions.

“If the Ukrainian delegation shows up at these talks with a mandate to abandon any ultimatums and look for common ground, I am sure that we could move forward even further than we did,” Izvestia quoted Kosachev as saying.

With reporting by Reuters and AP

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks to journalists during a press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, May 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

KYIV – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday that he will be waiting for his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in the Turkish capital this week to conduct face-to-face talks about the more than 3-year war, amid heavy pressure from the U.S. and European leaders to reach a settlement.

Putin hasn’t yet said whether he will be at the talks, which U.S. President Donald Trump has urged the two sides to attend as part of Washington’s efforts to stop the fighting.

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Zelenskyy told reporters in Kyiv that he will be in Ankara on Thursday to conduct the negotiations. He will meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the two will wait for Putin to arrive, he said.

Zelenskyy said he would “do everything to agree on a ceasefire, because it is with (Putin) that I must negotiate a ceasefire, as only he can decide on it.”

Zelenskyy said that if Putin chooses Istanbul to hold the meeting, then both leaders will travel there from Ankara.

“If Putin does not arrive and plays games, it is the final point that he does not want to end the war,” Zelenskyy said.

The Ukrainian leader added that if Putin doesn’t show up, European and U.S. leaders should follow through with threats of additional and heavy sanctions against Russia.

Trump, who is on a four-day Middle East trip, said Tuesday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio would attend the talks. Special envoy Steve Witkoff also is set to take part, according to a U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to preview plans that have not been made public.

Washington has been applying strong pressure on both sides to come to the table since Trump took office in January with a promise to end the war.

Military analysts say that both sides are preparing a spring-summer campaign on the battlefield, where a war of attrition has killed tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides along the roughly 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said Monday that Russia is “quickly replenishing front-line units with new recruits to maintain the battlefield initiative.”

German leader says ball is in Putin’s court

International pressure has been growing to push Ukraine and Russia into finding a settlement.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz pressed again for an unconditional 30-day ceasefire as he met his Greek counterpart in Berlin on Tuesday.

“We are waiting for Putin’s agreement,” he said.

“We agree that, in case there is no real progress this week, we then want to push at European level for a significant tightening of sanctions,” Merz added. He said that “we will focus on further areas, such as the energy sector and the financial market.”

Merz welcomed Zelenskyy’s readiness to travel personally to Turkey, “but now it is really up to Putin to accept this offer of negotiations and agree to a ceasefire. The ball is exclusively in Russia.”

Russia isn’t saying whether Putin will attend talks

Overnight, Russia launched 10 Shahed and decoy drones at Ukraine, the Ukrainian air force said. It was Russia’s smallest drone bombardment this year.

The Kremlin hasn’t directly responded to Zelenskyy’s challenge for Putin to meet him in person at the negotiating table.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined for the second straight day Tuesday to tell reporters whether Putin will travel to Istanbul and who else will represent Russia at the potential talks.

“As soon as the president considers it necessary, we will make an announcement,” Peskov said.

Russia has said that it will send a delegation to Istanbul without preconditions.

European leaders say Putin is dragging his feet

Zelenskyy won’t be meeting with any Russian officials in Istanbul other than Putin, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, said Tuesday on a YouTube show run by prominent Russian journalists in exile.

Lower-level talks would amount to simply “dragging out” any peace process, Podolyak said.

European leaders have recently accused Putin of dragging his feet in peace efforts, while he attempts to press his bigger army’s battlefield initiative and capture more Ukrainian land.

Russia effectively rejected an unconditional 30-day ceasefire, starting Monday, that was demanded by Ukraine and Western European leaders, when it fired more than 100 drones at Ukraine. Putin instead offered direct peace talks.

But the wrangling over whether a ceasefire should come before the talks begin has continued.

“Ukraine is ready for any format of negotiations with Russia, but a ceasefire must come first,” Andrii Yermak, the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, said Tuesday.

Negotiations are impossible while “the Ukrainian people are under attack by Russian missiles and drones around the clock,” Yermak said in a video address to the Copenhagen Democracy Summit 2025.

Putin has repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of the Ukrainian government, especially Zelenskyy himself, saying his term expired last year. Under Ukraine’s constitution, it’s illegal for the country to hold a national election while it’s under martial law, as it now is.

Zelenskyy dismissed claims that a decree enacted by him in 2022 prohibited him from meeting Putin, saying that the claim was Russian propaganda.

Putin and Zelenskyy have only met once, in 2019.

In the war’s early months, Zelenskyy repeatedly called for a personal meeting with Putin but was rebuffed. After the Kremlin’s decision in September 2022 to illegally annex four regions of Ukraine — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — Zelenskyy issued the decree declaring that holding negotiations with Putin had become impossible.

On Tuesday, Zelenskyy said that this decree affected other Ukrainian officials who were directly negotiating with the Russian leader.

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AP writers Geir Moulson in Berlin and Matthew Lee in Antalya, Turkey, contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (L) & Russia Presidents Vladimir Putin (R) | File Pic | File Pic

Kyiv: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he is prepared to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, shortly after US President Donald Trump urged him to “immediately” accept the Russian leader’s offer to hold peace talks in Turkey, CNN reported.

After meeting in Kyiv on Saturday, Ukraine’s major European allies gave Russia an ultimatum: agree to an unconditional 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine by Monday or face “massive” new sanctions.

Trump supported the initiative, Germany’s new chancellor Friedrich Merz said.

In a late-night address, Putin did not acknowledge the ultimatum. Ignoring the ceasefire offer, he instead proposed holding “direct talks” with Ukraine in Turkey on Thursday – something not seen since the early weeks of Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022, as per CNN.

Ukraine’s allies spent Sunday stressing that there could be no further talks before Putin agrees to an unconditional ceasefire. But Trump undermined the efforts to put pressure on Putin, saying that Ukraine should “immediately” agree to meet with Russian officials on Thursday, CNN reported.

“HAVE THE MEETING, NOW!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Within an hour, Zelenskyy said he was prepared to meet with Putin this week, in what would be the leaders’ first meeting since Russia launched its war, CNN reported.

Starting tomorrow, we await a ceasefire — this proposal is on the table. A full and unconditional ceasefire, one that lasts long enough to provide a necessary foundation for diplomacy, could significantly bring peace closer. Ukraine has long proposed this, our partners are… pic.twitter.com/TVpJbldfh4 — Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) May 11, 2025

“I will be waiting for Putin in Turkiye on Thursday. Personally. I hope that this time the Russians will not look for excuses,” Zelenskyy said on Sunday on X.

Although Zelenskyy said a “full and lasting ceasefire” from Monday would provide “the necessary basis for diplomacy,” he did not specify that this would be a precondition for attending the talks.

Whereas Putin on Saturday faced a joint call from Europe and the US to accept a ceasefire by Monday’s deadline, his counteroffer of “direct” talks had by Sunday relieved much of the pressure on Moscow and shifted the focus to the potential talks this week.

European leaders have not yet said whether they will press ahead with the threatened additional sanctions on Russia if a ceasefire is not in place by Monday.

Disclaimer: This is a syndicated feed. The article is not edited by the FPJ editorial team.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is looking to meet with President Trump at an upcoming Group of Seven (G7) summit, according to his office.

Andriy Yermak, head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, said that Trump and Zelensky will have a meeting amid the summit in Canada, according to a Friday article on Zelensky’s official website. The article stated that the comments came amid the United News telethon, which the Kyiv Independent has described as the largest television channel in the country’s merger of coverage.

In the first few months of his second term, Trump and his administration have pushed for an end to the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.

Last weekend, Ukraine struck one of its most harmful blows in its war against Russia, using smuggled drones to target bombers far into Russian territory.

In a thread on the social media platform X last Sunday, Zelensky said, “a brilliant operation was carried out — on enemy territory” that day.

“The preparation took over a year and a half. Planning, organi[z]ation, every detail was perfectly executed. It can be said with confidence that this was an absolutely unique operation,” Zelensky wrote about the attack.

Back in February, Zelensky, Trump and Vice President Vance all had a rocky meeting in the Oval Office that devolved into shouting and finger-pointing.

The Hill has reached out to the White House for comment.

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For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.

BOGOTA — A 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck central Colombia early Sunday, authorities said. No casualties were immediately reported.

The quake hit 17 kilometers (10.5 miles) northeast of Paratebueno, a city about 116 miles southeast of the capital, Bogota. The U.S. Geological Service reported the quake hit at 8:08 a.m. (1308 GMT) at a depth of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles).

The Colombian Geological Service reported additional tremors with magnitudes ranging from 4 to 4.6 occurred in the same area minutes later.

The National Unit for Disaster Risk Management said on X that it was assessing the situation in several municipalities.

Images posted on social media showed people in Bogota who felt the tremor — some left their workplaces to seek safety. Footage from rural areas indicated there was no damage.

Colombia lies in the Pacific Ring of Fire, a region known for frequent seismic and volcanic activity.

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