President Donald Trump said he would be calling Russian President Vladimir Putin after hosting the president of Ukraine at the White House. Trump sat down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on Monday before also meeting with other European leaders hastily gathered in Washington.

Melania Trump took the unique step of crafting a letter calling for peace in Ukraine, having her husband Donald Trump deliver it to Vladimir Putin.

Ukraine’s Donbas region, consisting of Donetsk and Luhansk, is at the heart of Moscow’s goals. An industrial powerhouse in the Soviet era, it also has rich farmland, important rivers and a coastline on the Sea of Azov.

Under the proposed Russian deal, Kyiv would fully withdraw from the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions in return for a Russian pledge to freeze the front lines in the southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, the sources said.

President Donald Trump walked into a summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin pressing for a ceasefire deal and threatening “severe consequences” and tough new sanctions if the Kremlin leader failed to agree to halt the fighting in Ukraine.

Fresh off President Donald Trump’s Friday summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, Sen. Lindsey Graham thinks the next phase of American diplomacy over the war in Ukraine needs to target Moscow’s pocketbook.

"If peace is not going to be possible here and this is just going to continue on as a war, people will continue to die by the thousands ... we may unfortunately wind up there, but we don't want to wind up there,

Special U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff says Russian leader Vladimir Putin agreed at his summit with President Donald Trump to allow the U.S. and European allies to offer Ukraine a security guarantee resembling NATO’s collective defense mandate as part of an eventual deal to end the 3 1/2-year war.