Ukraine war live: Kremlin welcomes meeting with Trump

This week, the president-elect refused to rule out using economic or military force to seize the Panama Canal and (or) wrestle Greenland away from Denmark, writes world affairs editor Sam Kiley. He’s taught Europe an important lesson

Ukraine expects high level contacts with the new US administration immediately after Donald Trump takes office, including an eventual meeting between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky, Kyiv’s foreign ministry said on Friday.

“We are waiting for a meeting between our presidents because for us the main thing is to work together with America… we are preparing for contacts at the highest and high levels immediately after the inauguration,” ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi said.

The Kremlin has welcomed a meeting with US president-elect Donald Trump just days after he claimed Vladimir Putin wanted to sit down with him.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said there could be progress on setting up the meeting after Trump is sworn in as US president on 20 January.

Trump claimed Putin wanted to meet with him as he spoke with Republican governors at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, earlier this week.

“President Putin wants to meet. He has said that even publicly and we have to get that war over with. That’s a bloody mess,” he said.

On Thursday, Trump pushed back his campaign pledge to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours and said six months was a more realistic target.

“The whole [Trump] team is obsessed with strength and looking strong, so they’re recalibrating the Ukraine approach,” a European official told the Financial Times.

Vladimir Putin’s forces have launched a fresh drone assault on Ukraine as Donald Trump revealed the Russian leader wants to meet him.

Russian troops fired up to 72 drones at Ukraine overnight, hitting various buildings in the northern region of Chernihiv, as Kyiv’s airforce was scrambled to down 33 of them, it said.

Ukraine’s army struck a supermarket on Friday in the Russian-held city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine in an attack that used US-supplied missiles and wounded two people, a senior Russian-backed official said.

There was no immediate comment from Ukraine and Reuters could not immediately confirm the report.

Unverified photos posted on social media showed a burnt out car in front of a shattered two-storey circular building surrounded by debris.

Dashcam footage posted by a driver nearby appeared to show the moment the supermarket – called Moloko (Milk) – was struck, with an ensuing large explosion and flames soaring into the sky.