Russia is 'ready for war' with Europe

Vladimir Putin has accused European powers of sabotaging peace in Ukraine and threatened that Russia was ready for war with the continent as Donald Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, arrived for talks at the Kremlin last night.

- Pjotr Sauer Andrew Roth

Moments before the closed-door meeting with Witkoff and Kushner, Putin made a series of hard-edged remarks. Speaking to reporters, he accused European governments of hindering the peace process and said that “European demands” on ending the war in Ukraine were “not acceptable to Russia”.

“Europe is preventing the US administration from achieving peace on Ukraine,” the Russian president said, adding: “Russia does not intend to fight Europe, but if Europe starts, we are ready right now.”

Putin did not clarify which European demands he found unacceptable.

"They are on the side of war," Putin said of the European powers.

Witkoff, on his sixth trip to Moscow this year, was expected to present Putin with an updated version of a US peace proposal drafted with input from a senior Russian official and reworked to make it more acceptable to Kyiv.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said he was "awaiting signals" from the US delegation after its meeting with Putin, in an intense round of shuttle diplomacy that the Trump administration has claimed is its best chance yet of bringing an end to the war.

But there remains scepticism that Russia is ready to accept any concessions, rather than continue the war and await a further breakdown in relations between the Trump White House and its European allies.