Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service studios in central London. I'm Tim Franks.

The White House gave us a few more morsels today ahead of Friday summit between President Trump and Putin.

That the two men will meet in the city of Anchorage in Alaska,

that it will be, as they put it, a listening exercise, and that it will be a one-on-one.

In other words, the Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky, will definitely not be invited.

For his part, President Zelensky has been assiduously trying to do some scene-setting himself today,

with a briefing to reporters in Kiev. That was shortly before we came on air. He warned that

Ukraine could not simply abandon territory conquered by invading Russian forces.

Yet he was also speaking as reports were coming in of some further Russian advances

in the East, albeit small and albeit at huge cost to the Russian military. Jonathan Beal is

our defence correspondent and he's in the Ukrainian capital Kiev. What can he tell us first

about those latest military movements? Well, President Zelensky talked about this,

which essentially said was three groups of Russian soldiers

advancing nine to ten kilometres behind Ukraine's front line

in that area of Percross,

an area which they've been fighting for for the best part of this year, longer than a year,

and where they are taking territory and they are making gains, slowly but surely,

at the cost of around about a thousand Russian casualties every single day.

President Zelensky says in contrast Ukraine's casualties are about a third of that.

But President Zelensky said one of those groups had been hunted down, captured or killed,

that they would find the other two groups.

He says 20 to 30 men, I don't know how he knows that figure if they haven't found the other two groups,

...