MOSCOW (Reuters) -President Vladimir Putin spoke to the leaders of Belarus and Kazakhstan on Sunday to update them on the summit with U.S. President Donald Trump which the Kremlin has cast as a potentially significant stepping stone towards peace in Ukraine.

After his meeting with Trump in Alaska, the first U.S.-Russian summit in more than four years, Putin updated his top officials in the Kremlin on Saturday.

Putin told Russia’s top officials that the visit was timely and “very useful”, adding that he and Trump had spoken about a possible end to the Ukraine war “on a fair basis”, noting the need to deal with the “root causes” of the crisis.

“We have not had direct negotiations of this kind at this level for a long time. I repeat once again: there was an opportunity to calmly and in det

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