President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that Russia needs to strengthen its position in the global arms market by increasing exports of weapons.

Few details were known about Monday's call, aside from Trump's reported attempt to initiate peace talks aimed at ending the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin has visited Kursk for the first time since claiming to have completely retaken the Russian region from Ukrainian forces, state media reported on Wednesday, as the Russian president attempts to repel international pressure to agree to a 30-day ceasefire on the other side of the border.

President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the war in Ukraine and other matters by phone for two hours on Monday. The conversation yielded no breakthrough on efforts to end the largest ground war in Europe since World War II. A ceasefire seems as far as ever.

Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the western Kursk region on Tuesday, the first time he stopped by since Russian forces ejected Ukrainian troops from the area.

The author joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “The Piano Tuner's Wives,” which was published in The New Yorker in 1995. The eighty-seven-year-old French director, in town for a rerelease of “A Man and a Woman,” his swinging-sixties “make-out movie,” ponders what he believes will be his final film.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio got into a testy exchange with a congressman on Wednesday after he repeatedly refused to directly call Russian PresidentVladimir Putin a war criminal. It happened during a House hearing when Maryland Democratic Rep.