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LONDON: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will meet with ally UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in London on Thursday ahead of a key US-Russia summit in Alaska.
Zelensky was to arrive at 9:30 am (0830 GMT) at Downing Street, the prime minister’s office said, after Starmer on Wednesday maintained there was now a “viable” chance for a Ukraine ceasefire.
US President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin will meet Friday at an air base in the far-northern US state, the first time the Russian leader has been permitted on Western soil since his February 2022 invasion of Ukraine which has killed tens of thousands of people.
A stepped-up Russian offensive, and the fact Zelensky has not been invited to the Anchorage meeting Friday, have heightened fears that Trump and Putin could strike a deal that forces painful concessions on Ukraine.
Near the front line Thursday, Ukraine fired dozens of drones at Russia overnight into the early morning, wounding three people and sparking fires including at an oil refinery in the southern city of Volgograd.
Kyiv calls the strikes fair retaliation for Moscow’s daily missile and drone barrages on its own civilians.
With such high stakes, all sides were pushing hard in the hours before Friday’s meeting.
Zelensky, who has refused to surrender territory to Russia, spoke by telephone Wednesday with Trump, as did European leaders who voiced confidence afterward that the US leader would seek a ceasefire rather than concessions by Kyiv.
Trump has sent mixed messages, saying that he could quickly organize a three-way summit afterward with both Zelensky and Putin but also warning of his impatience with Putin.
“There may be no second meeting because, if I feel that it’s not appropriate to have it because I didn’t get the answers that we have to have, then we are not going to have a second meeting,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday.
But Trump added: “If the first one goes okay, we’ll have a quick second one,” involving both Putin and Zelensky.
Zelensky, after being berated by Trump at a February meeting in the White House, has publicly supported US diplomacy but has made clear his deep skepticism.
“I have told my colleagues — the US president and our European friends — that Putin definitely does not want peace,” Zelensky said.
As the war rages on in eastern Ukraine, Zelensky was in Berlin Wednesday joining Chancellor Friedrich Merz on an online call with other European leaders, and the NATO and EU chiefs, to show a united stance against Russia.
Starmer on Wednesday said Ukraine’s military backers, the so-called Coalition of the Willing, had drawn up workable military plans in case of a ceasefire but were also ready to add pressure on Russia through sanctions.
“For three and a bit years this conflict has been going, we haven’t got anywhere near... a viable way of bringing it to a ceasefire,” Starmer told Wednesday’s meeting of European leaders.
“Now we do have that chance, because of the work that the (US) president has put in,” he said.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte declared: “The ball is now in Putin’s court.”

BOGOTA: Colombia buried murdered presidential candidate Miguel Uribe on Wednesday, with his widow tearfully warning that the country must shake its dark and long history of political violence.
The 39-year-old conservative senator was shot in June while campaigning in the capital, Bogota, and died this week of his injuries.
“Our country is going through the darkest, saddest, and most painful days,” Maria Claudia Tarazona told a packed cathedral funeral service as she prepared to bury her husband.
Police have blamed Uribe’s murder on left-wing guerrillas who shunned 2016 peace accords. Six people have been arrested in connection with the alleged plot.
For most Colombians, the assassination represented a shocking spasm of political violence after years of relative peace.
Four presidential candidates were assassinated during the 1980s and 1990s, as drug cartels and various armed groups terrorized the country.
Uribe’s own mother, journalist Diana Turbay, was killed in a botched 1991 police operation to free her from cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel.
On Wednesday Uribe’s father, Miguel Uribe Londono, remembered the day 34 years ago when she was killed.
“With all the pain in my soul, I had to tell a little boy of barely four years old the horrendous news of his mother’s murder,” he said at the service.
“In this same holy cathedral, I carried Miguel in one arm and the coffin of his mother, Diana, in the other.”
“Today, 34 years later, this senseless violence also takes from me that same little boy,” he said.
As Colombia reels from the assassination, conservative lawmaker Julio Cesar Triana, a vocal critic of the government, escaped unharmed after his vehicle came under fire in the southern Huila region where dissident members of the defunct FARC guerrilla group are operating.

Uribe’s wife vowed at the funeral that his death at the hands of a suspected 15-year-old hitman would not be in vain, and that his young son and stepdaughters would live a life filled with love.
“Miguel, I will love you every day of my life until my time comes to meet you in heaven,” she said.
“I promise to give Alejandro and the girls a life full of love and happiness, without hatred and without resentment.”
Colombia will hold elections in 2026 to replace incumbent leftist leader Gustavo Petro, who is constitutionally barred from running again.
President Petro, himself a former guerrilla, said he chose not to attend Wednesday’s funeral at the family’s request.
“We’re not going, not because we didn’t want to,” he posted on social media. “We simply respect the family and we avoid the funeral of Senator Miguel Uribe from being taken over by supporters of hate.”
It was expected that some of those marking their respects may have booed the president, who has taken a conciliatory approach to armed groups.
That stance has been strongly criticized by those on the right wing of Colombian politics.
Former presidents Juan Manuel Santos, Ernesto Samper, and Cesar Gaviria attended the funeral.