The Russian city of Volgograd was the location of one of the bloodiest fights in world history. The seven-month-long Battle of Stalingrad, as the city was known in 1943, claimed half a million Soviet lives.

Russia’s top diplomat said in an interview released on Friday that “there is no meeting planned” between President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. It was the Kremlin’s most direct declaration yet that a summit the White House suggested was imminent was nowhere close to materializing.

The denial of a Putin-Zelenskyy meeting comes days after Donald Trump said he had begun arrangements for them to sit down together.