Putin agrees to resume trilateral talks on Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday said the Kremlin would be ready to resume trilateral Russia-US-Ukraine peace talks after mid-November, at the request of US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff.
The Trump’s special envoy held a meeting with the Russian president for around three hours.
The Russian leader has agreed “in principle” to resume the talks after 10 November, Putin’s foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov told reporters following the meeting.
The meeting in St Petersburg came off the back of Witkoff’s “productive” Tuesday summit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Norway, as the US seeks to advance proposals to end to the war. 
The trilateral talks will focus on “building a security system for Russia and Ukraine after the conflict ends,” Ushakov said.
Witkoff’s talks with Putin about Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine came as Trump pushes Kyiv to make a deal that stops the fighting. Zelenskyy has insisted only a summit of leaders can break the impasse. The two armies remain locked on the battlefield and they pummel each other with daily long-range strikes.
Representatives of the three countries held three rounds of trilateral negotiations early this year, meeting twice in Abu Dhabi in January and February, followed by further talks in Geneva in February.
However, there was little progress beyond exchanges of prisoners of war as Moscow and Kyiv stuck to their basic demands. 
Meanwhile, Putin on Wednesday said Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old US citizen held in Russian custody since 2022, had been freed and was at St Petersburg's Pulkovo airport.
Putin did not give further details in comments published by Russian state media. The Kremlin chief made the announcement at a meeting with US envoy Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg.
Hubbard, a retired schoolteacher from Michigan, had been serving a nearly seven-year prison sentence in Russia following a conviction for mercenary activity at a closed-door trial.
He was arrested in April 2022 in the eastern Ukrainian city of Izyum, where Russian prosecutors alleged he had been manning a Ukrainian military checkpoint.
On the other hand, Russia will dispatch its first tanker with diesel for the United States on Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said, according to the Vedomosti news outlet, after a deal with US President Donald Trump.
Russia lifted its self-imposed ban on diesel exports on 9 October, introduced to tackle domestic shortages triggered by Ukrainian drone attacks on refineries, after reaching the deal with Trump to supply diesel to global markets.
Another trilateral meeting between Vladimir Putin, his US counterpart Donald Trump and Xi Jinping of China is "being prepared", the Kremlin said on Wednesday.
"A possible first-ever meeting of the leaders of China, Russia and the United States... is being prepared," Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters, adding that the aim was to include the meeting in the programme of the Asia-Pacific summit in Shenzhen next month.