A senior Russian military officer has died in a car bomb on the same day Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff met with Vladimir Putin.

Putin and Witkoff were all smiles when they greeted each other for the three-hour negotiations about ending the war in Ukraine.

Afterwards said US President said progress on a peace deal between the warring sides was going “smoothly”.

Russian media outlet Baza said a bomb in a parked car had been detonated remotely when the officer — who lived locally — walked past in the town just east of Moscow.

He was named as Yaroslav Moskalik, deputy head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces.

“According to available data, the explosion occurred as a result of the detonation of a homemade explosive device filled with destructive elements,” the Investigative Committee said.

Its statement did not say who might be behind the incident.

Several high-ranking Russian military figures have been assassinated since the start of the war in Ukraine in operations blamed by Moscow on Kyiv.

The Izvestia newspaper published video showing a person approaching a line of parked cars outside an apartment complex and an explosion that sent parts of a vehicle flying metres into the air.

Meanwhile, Trump has made another push to pressure Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to make concessions to end the war.

In comments in a Time magazine interview, Trump said “Crimea will stay with Russia” .

“Zelensky understands that,” Trump said in an interview published on Friday, referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky,

“And everybody understands that it’s been with them for a long time.”

Crimea is a strategic peninsula along the Black Sea in southern Ukraine. It was seized by Russia in 2014, while US President Barack Obama was in office, years before the full-scale invasion that began in 2022.

“They’ve had their submarines there for long before any period that we’re talking about, for many years. The people speak largely Russian in Crimea,” Trump said.

“But this was given by Obama. This wasn’t given by Trump.”

Meanwhile, Russia has continued its bombardment. A drone struck an apartment building in a southeastern Ukraine city, killing three people and injuring 10 others, officials said Friday, a day after Trump rebuked Russia’s leader for a deadly missile and drone attack on Kyiv.

Russian forces fired 103 Shahed and decoy drones at five Ukrainian regions overnight, Ukraine’s air force reported. Authorities in the northeastern Sumy and Kharkiv regions reported damage to civilian infrastructure but no casualties.

The war could be approaching a pivotal moment as the Trump administration weighs its options. Senior US officials have warned that the administration could soon give up attempts to stop the war if the two sides do not come to an agreement. That could potentially mean a halt of crucial US military aid for Ukraine.

Amid the peace efforts, Russia pounded Kyiv in an hours-long barrage on Thursday, killing at least 12 people and injuring 87 in its deadliest assault on the Ukrainian capital since July.

The attack drew a rare rebuke of Putin from Trump, who has said that a push to end the war is coming to a head.

“I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform.

“Lets get the Peace Deal DONE!”

Trump’s frustration is growing as his effort to forge a deal between Ukraine and Russia has failed to achieve a breakthrough.

Trump accused Zelensky on Wednesday of prolonging the “killing field” by refusing to surrender the Russia-occupied Crimea Peninsula as part of a possible deal.

Russia illegally annexed that area in 2014. Zelenskiy has repeated many times during the war that recognising occupied territory as Russian is a red line for his country.

Trump and Zelensky plan to arrive in Rome on Friday for the funeral of Pope Francis in the Vatican’s St Peter’s Square on Saturday. It wasn’t immediately clear if they would meet separately.

Russian forces used Thursday’s attack on Kyiv as cover to launch almost 150 assaults on Ukrainian positions along the roughly 1000km front line, Zelenskiy said late on Thursday.

“When the maximum of our forces was focused on defence against missiles and drones, the Russians went on to significantly intensify their ground attacks,” he wrote on Telegram.

Western European leaders have accused Putin of dragging his feet in the negotiations and seeking to grab more Ukrainian land while his army has battlefield momentum.

Zelensky noted that Ukraine agreed to a US ceasefire proposal 44 days ago, as a first step to a negotiated peace, but that Russian attacks continued.

-with AAP