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DNIPROPETROVSK REGION, Ukraine: US President Donald Trump said 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.

Those comments came as Ukrainian soldiers on the battlefield expressed little hope for a diplomatic solution to the war and Trump’s deadline arrived 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.

Trump’s efforts to pressure Putin into stopping the fighting have so far delivered no progress. Russia’s bigger army is slowly advancing deeper into Ukraine at great cost in troops and armor while it relentlessly bombards Ukrainian cities. Russia and Ukraine are far apart on their terms for peace.

Ukrainian troops say they are ready to keep fighting

Ukrainian forces are locked in intense battles along the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line that snakes from northeast to southeast Ukraine. The Pokrovsk area of the eastern Donetsk region is taking the brunt of punishment as Russia seeks to break out into the neighboring Dnipropetrovsk region. Ukraine has significant manpower shortages.

Intense fighting is also taking place in Ukraine’s northern Sumy border region, where Ukrainian forces are engaging Russian soldiers to prevent reinforcements being sent from there to Donetsk.

In the Pokrovsk area of Donetsk, a commander said he believes Moscow isn’t interested in peace.

“It is impossible to negotiate with them. The only option is to defeat them,” Buda, a commander of a drone unit in the Spartan Brigade, told The Associated Press. He used only his call sign, in keeping with the rules of the Ukrainian military.

“I would like them to agree and for all this to stop, but Russia will not agree to that. It does not want to negotiate. So the only option is to defeat them,” he said.

In the southern Zaporizhzhia region, a howitzer commander using the call sign Warsaw, said troops are determined to thwart Russia’s invasion.

“We are on our land, we have no way out,” he said. “So we stand our ground, we have no choice.”

Putin makes a flurry of phone calls

The Kremlin said Friday that Putin had a phone call with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, during which the Russian leader informed Xi about the results of his meeting earlier this week with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff. Kremlin officials said Xi “expressed support for the settlement of the Ukrainian crisis on a long-term basis.”

Putin is due to visit China next month. China, along with North Korea and Iran, have provided military support for Russia’s war effort, the US says.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on X that he also had a call with Putin to speak about the latest Ukraine developments. Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to place an additional 25 percent tariff on India for its purchases of Russian oil, which the American president says is helping to finance Russia’s war.

Putin’s calls followed his phone conversations with the leaders of South Africa, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Belarus, the Kremlin said.

The calls suggested to at least one analyst that Putin perhaps wanted to brief Russia’s most important allies about a potential settlement that could be reached at a summit with Trump.

“It means that some sort of real peace agreement has been reached for the first time,” said Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin Moscow-based analyst.

Analysts say Putin is aiming to outlast the West

Trump said Thursday that he would meet with Putin even if the Russian leader will not meet with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky. That stoked fears in Europe that Ukraine could be sidelined in efforts to stop the continent’s biggest conflict since World War II.

Trump’s comments followed a statement from Putin that he hoped to meet with Trump as early as next week, possibly in the United Arab Emirates. The White House said it was still working through the details of any potential meetings.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, said in an assessment Thursday that “Putin remains uninterested in ending his war and is attempting to extract bilateral concessions from the United States without meaningfully engaging in a peace process.”

“Putin continues to believe that time is on Russia’s side and that Russia can outlast Ukraine and the West,” it said.

LONDON: The UK’s Foreign Office is under growing pressure after it emerged it failed to publish a 2024 internal assessment that reportedly found no serious risk of genocide in Gaza, and refused to say whether a new assessment has since been carried out.

Amnesty International filed a freedom of information request in June to obtain a copy the document and ask whether any reassessment has taken place amid the escalating violence in the territory.

After receiving no response within the specified time frame for such requests, Amnesty lodged a formal complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office, .

The government has come under fire for what critics describe as a contradictory stance, and calls for transparency are mounting. While ministers have insisted that only international courts can determine whether or not genocide is taking place, they told a domestic court, during a recent case brought by human rights group Al-Haq, that officials had reviewed the issue and found “Israel’s actions and statements did not create such a risk.”

Extracts from the unpublished 2024 assessment were disclosed in court. One part stated: “No evidence has been seen that Israel is deliberately targeting civilian women or children. There is also evidence of Israel making efforts to limit incidental harm to civilians.”

Another said: “There is no evidence of a high-level strategic decision, passed down through military chains of command, like that which was in evidence for the massacre and deportations at Srebrenica that were found in the Bosnian genocide case to constitute genocide (the ICJ’s only finding of genocide to date),” referring to the International Court of Justice.

The document reportedly concluded that Israel’s conduct could be “reasonably explained as a legitimate military campaign waged as part of an intensive armed conflict in a densely populated urban area,” and also cited the use of human shields by Hamas.

However, Amnesty argued that parts of the assessment appear to be outdated, and said the government might have updated its conclusions without disclosing them.

Kristyan Benedict of Amnesty said: “The government’s refusal to engage with us on this raises the suspicion that the government has made a further genocide assessment, and it is likely to be different from the 2024 claim that there was no serious risk of a genocide.”

More than 60 MPs wrote to the Foreign Office in May urging it to publish any updated assessments regarding the risk of genocide in Gaza.

The debate comes amid growing international concern about developments in the territory, with some legal experts and Israeli nongovernmental organizations accusing Israeli authorities of showing genocidal intent.

On Friday, Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey described Israel’s latest plan, to occupy Gaza City and displace tens of thousands of Palestinians, as “ethnic cleansing.”