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Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is ready to meet Donald Trump but has yet to agree a date, the Kremlin said on Friday, after the US president-elect said the two sides were preparing a possible summit.

The comments by Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesperson, came after Trump answered questions about a possible meeting with Putin by saying “we’re setting it up”, while adding he would prefer to wait until after his inauguration on January 20.

“President Putin has repeatedly declared his openness to contacts with international partners, including the US president and Donald Trump”, Peskov told the press, according to the Interfax news agency.

He added: “It looks like some progress will be made after Mr Trump takes the Oval Office.”

Outgoing US President Joe Biden cut off direct communication with Putin following the start of the Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Asked about a possible summit at his Mar-a-Lago Florida resort or elsewhere, Trump said after a meeting with Republican governors on Thursday: “President Putin wants to meet — he’s said that even publicly — and we have to get that [Ukraine] war over, that’s a bloody mess.”

The president-elect described the death toll as “staggering” and added: “It’s a war that I’m going to try really to stop as quickly as I can.”

Pushing back his campaign pledge to end the war in “24 hours”, Trump suggested this week that six months was a more realistic target to bring hostilities to an end.

European leaders and officials have been making the case to the president-elect and his team that continued US military aid is needed to put Kyiv in a stronger position for peace talks and help bring Moscow to the negotiating table.

According to a former senior Kremlin official and another person who has discussed the issue with the Russian president, Putin’s main goal in any talks is new security agreements to ensure Ukraine never joins Nato and that the US-led military alliance pulls back from some eastern deployments.

“He wants to change the rules of the international order so there are no threats to Russia. He is very worried about how the world will look after the war,” the former Kremlin official said. “Trump wants to roll back Nato anyway. The world is changing, anything can happen.”

Western officials including Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte have sought to stress the importance of Trump ensuring “peace through strength” in Ukraine, and avoiding a defeat for Kyiv that would embolden Putin and his allies in China, Iran and North Korea.

After months of legal twists and turns, Donald Trump’s most active criminal case is finally reaching a conclusion.

The former and future president is scheduled to appear in a Manhattan courtroom on Friday for his sentencing on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a payment to an adult film star.

Trump on Thursday exhausted his last legal maneuver to stop the sentencing, after a narrow majority of Supreme Court justices declined to intervene.

The hearing comes just 10 days before Trump is expected to be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. He had argued the sentencing would interfere with his ability to govern.

In light of that, New York state Judge Juan Merchan has indicated he does not plan on sentencing Trump to prison or even probation, and is instead likely to offer an “unconditional discharge,” meaning the president-elect must do nothing, but the conviction will remain on his record.

Prosecutors have signaled the hearing could be short — less than an hour — and that Trump is expected to attend the hearing virtually.

“There’s nothing else that the defendant has to do, and therefore it’s the least restrictive in terms of how it could impede in any way on the president-elect as he takes office,” Anna Cominsky, director of the criminal defense clinic at New York Law School, said about the expected sentence of an unconditional discharge.

“It certainly makes sense that there be some finality to this case because as a nation, we should want to move on, in particular as he assumes the role of president, and be able to look forward to the next four years without this sentence pending,” Cominsky said. “There has to be an end.”

Of course, Trump’s legal team is likely to appeal the conviction and sentence again — as they have done throughout the legal proceeding. Appeals could stretch on for years.

Since Trump’s conviction in May, Merchan has postponed the sentencing several times, including to avoid any perception of political bias ahead of Election Day, and then to allow Trump to argue he had immunity in the case, based on a Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.

Merchan ultimately denied the immunity claims, and the dismissal, paving the way for the hearing on Friday.

Fundraising haul

In May, Trump became the first former or sitting U.S. president to be tried on criminal charges and be convicted.

The jury in Manhattan state court heard from 22 witnesses during about a month of testimony in Manhattan’s criminal court. Jurors also weighed other evidence — mostly documents like phone records, invoices and checks to Michael Cohen, Trump’s once loyal “fixer,” who paid adult-film star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her story of an alleged affair with the former president.

After about a day-and-a-half of deliberations, the 12 jurors said they unanimously agreed that Trump falsified business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to Daniels in order to influence the 2016 presidential election.

But the conviction appeared to have little impact on Trump’s popularity — and ultimate electoral victory during the 2024 presidential election. He has used the legal drama to mobilize donations for his campaign and mounting legal fees.

Within 24 hours of the guilty verdict, Trump’s campaign boasted of raising millions of dollars.

And 49% of the nation’s voters in November’s election ultimately chose to bring Trump back to the White House.

More than 5,000 structures have been destroyed by the Palisades fire, California officials said on Thursday. An analysis of satellite images by Microsoft offered a glimpse of the devastation in one section of Pacific Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood between Malibu and Santa Monica.

In this one area alone, there appeared to be more than 2,000 buildings that were damaged or destroyed, according to the analysis.

The results of the analysis are estimates, and they are limited by the presence of wildfire smoke partially obscuring satellites.

As firefighters continued on Thursday to battle the Palisades and major wildfires burning across the Los Angeles area, the full scope of the damage remained unclear. But officials said the Palisades and the Eaton fire, burning to the east near Pasadena, were likely among the most devastating fires in the state’s recorded history. Officials suggested that 5,000 buildings may have also burned because of the Eaton fire.

The Palisades fire began on Tuesday and quickly grew. By Thursday, it had charred more than 20,000 acres, and remained out of control.

Aerial photographs of Pacific Palisades showed that the fire leveled whole swaths of the neighborhood near the Palisades Village shopping mall, north of Sunset Boulevard.

Widespread damage was also visible in this section of the Pacific Palisades south of Sunset Boulevard, bordered by the Pacific Coast Highway to the south. Only a few houses appeared to be standing amid the destruction.

Across the city, the Eaton fire continued to burn uncontrollably as well. It encompassed more than 13,000 acres by Thursday evening, forcing nearby residents to evacuate.