WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — The United States is working to “schedule” a meeting between Donald Trump and his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts, Vice President JD Vance said Sunday, as Ukraine’s European allies push for Kyiv’s presence at the US-Russia summit in Alaska this week.

“One of the most important logjams is that Vladimir Putin said that he would never sit down with (Volodymyr) Zelensky, the head of Ukraine, and the president has now got that to change,” Vance said during an interview on Fox News program “Sunday Morning Futures.”

“We’re at a point now where we’re trying to figure out, frankly, scheduling and things like that around when these three leaders could sit down and discuss an end to this conflict,” Vance said when asked about his expectations for the Alaska summit on 15 August.

US Ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Matthew Whitaker suggested on CNN that Zelensky could attend the summit.

He was asked whether Zelensky might join Trump and Putin on Friday.

“Yes, I certainly think it’s possible,” he said.

The vice president said the US was going to “try to find some negotiated settlement that the Ukrainians and Russians can live with.”

Whitaker said the decision would ultimately be Trump’s to make.

“If he thinks that that is the best scenario to invite Zelensky, then he will do that,” he said, adding that “no decision has been made to this point.”

The planned US-Russia summit in Alaska without Zelensky had raised concerns that a deal would require Kyiv to cede swaths of territory, which the European Union has rejected.

“It’s not going to make anybody super happy, both the Russians and the Ukrainians probably at the end of the day are going to be unhappy with it,” Vance said.

Attacks

Tens of thousands of people have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with millions forced to flee their homes.

A new round of Moscow’s shelling and drone attacks killed six people and wounded dozens in Ukraine Sunday, authorities said, while Kyiv hit two oil refineries deep inside Russia.

“Russia has not taken a single real step towards peace, not a single step on the ground or in the air that could save lives,” Zelensky said in a regular evening address on Sunday.

Six people died across the eastern regions of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, their respective authorities said.

A Russian glide bomb hit a busy bus station in the city of Zaporizhzhia in a separate afternoon strike, wounding 19 people at once, the local officials said, adding that a search and rescue operation was still ongoing.