Hello and welcome to NewsHour.
It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service studios in central London.
I'm Tim Franks.
If you consume your news on TV these days, well,
it won't be long before you see archive footage from 2019.
Donald Trump doing one of his high-energy handshakes of Vladimir Putin,
the last time the two men met during his first term in office.
Those six-year-old pictures are doing the rounds ahead of next Friday when the two men are due to meet again in Alaska.
They'll be talking, of course, about the war in Ukraine,
the conflict that Russia began in 2014 and then heightened hugely with the full invasion of its neighbour three and a half years ago.
Overnight, a joint statement by Britain, France, Germany,
Poland and other countries said that Ukraine must be part of the discussions and decisions about how to end the war and arrive at a stable peace.
From the streets of the capital, Kiev,
these voices expressed deep concern about the possibility of negotiations.
negotiations between Presidents Trump and Putin that excluded Ukraine.
I'm against it.
Otherwise, our struggle will have all been for nothing.
And we're just supposed to accept that Putin can take our territory?
He won't stop there.
That's for sure.