Trump denies Kremlin: Ukraine did not target Putin's residence

US President Donald Trump told reporters on Sunday that US officials have determined that Ukraine did not target a residence belonging to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a drone strike last week, contradicting Kremlin claims that Trump had received the news with deep concern.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said last week that Ukraine had launched a wave of drones towards Putin's state residence in the northwestern Novgorod region, which Russian defense systems had managed to defeat.

Lavrov has also criticized Kiev for launching the attack at a time of intense negotiations to end the war.

The accusation came just a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Florida for talks with Trump on the US administration's still-under-development 20-point plan to end the war. Zelensky immediately denied the Kremlin's claim.

Meanwhile, Trump said that "something happened near" Putin's residence, but US officials had not been able to determine that the Russian president's residence had been targeted.

"I don't believe this attack happened," Trump told reporters as he traveled back to Washington on Sunday after spending two weeks at his Florida home. 

"We don't believe this happened, now that we've been able to verify it," he added.  

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The US president has struggled to fulfill a promise to quickly end the war in Ukraine and has shown irritation with both Zelensky and Putin as he tried to broker an end to the conflict that he boasted during the election campaign that he could end in a day.

Trump and Zelensky said last week they had made progress in their talks at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort.

But Putin has shown little interest in ending the war until all of Russia's objectives are met, including gaining control of all Ukrainian territory in the key industrial region of Donbas and imposing strict limits on the size of Ukraine's post-war military and the type of weapons it can possess.