US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky held crunch war talks in the heart of the Vatican minutes before the start of the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday, as the White House mounts an increasingly urgent push to strike a peace deal in Ukraine.

Donald Trump has expressed his disappointment with Vladimir Putin, urging him to cease hostilities in Ukraine and finalize a peace agreement. Following a meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump criticized Putin's attacks on civilian areas,

Three Nobel Peace Prize-winning groups campaigning to eliminate nuclear weapons joined forces on Monday to urge the US and Russian presidents to meet and agree on significant denuclearisation. The joint appeal came from Japan's atomic bomb survivors' group Nihon Hidankyo,