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Hopes for Ukraine-Russia peace talks crumble as Vladimir Putin turns down a face-to-face meeting with

Volodymyr Zelensky. Plus, the Supreme Court prepares to hear its first oral arguments over President

Trump's second-term agenda and trans-Pacific trade roars back to life.

After the onset of the trade war, trade between the U.S. and China started in some ways to grind

to a halt. But the Thor in recent days has pretty swiftly fed through into a resumption in

activity.

It's Thursday, May 15th. I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal.

And here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines

and business stories moving your world today.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is unlikely to get the face-to-face meeting in Turkey

with Vladimir Putin that he'd been calling for this week, with the Russian president instead sending a junior team of officials to Istanbul for their diminishing prospects for direct negotiations, let alone an agreement to end the war.

James Marston is the journal's Ukraine bureau chief. James, what can we read into this move by Putin? We had played a clip of President Zelensky earlier in the week in which he seemed to be pressing Putin into attending, basically saying that's what President Trump wanted to see happen, and yet evidently Putin didn't feel pressure here.

Well, Putin had actually proposed these talks himself. Both sides are trying to demonstrate, I think, to the Trump administration,

that they are the ones that are trying to make peace. And so what happened is Zelensky

called Putin's bluff. He not only said, absolutely happy to do talks, but I want to do talks

only with President Putin. And we want to discuss the ceasefire that Ukraine has already agreed to.

This is a ceasefire proposed in March by President Trump,

a 30-day ceasefire, unconditional ceasefire. Russia has sort of kicked the can down the road.

And then late last night, we found out that the Russian delegation that was going to go

was going to be led by a former culture minister and an aid to Putin called Vladimir

...