President Vladimir Putin visited injured Russian soldiers and a video of it was posted on Twitter. In the video Putin can be seen shaking the hands of the soldiers who are in their pyjamas.

This is Putin’s first known visit to meet soldiers who have been fighting in Ukraine. The Russian President can be seen wearing a white lab coat when he meets these soldiers.

Russia’s offensive in Ukraine has seen a lot of casualties from both sides with many soldiers being taken as prisoners of war.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has said the discovery of mass killings in areas occupied by Russian troops earlier in the war, particularly outside Kyiv, made it more difficult to arrange talks and he would rule out any discussions with other officials.

Earlier this week the Ukrainian head of state had said that President Vladimir Putin was the only Russian official he was willing to meet with to discuss how to end the war.

“I cannot accept any kind of meeting with anyone coming from the Russian Federation but the president,” he said. “And only in the case when there is one issue on the (table): stopping the war. There are no other grounds for any other kind of meeting.”

In his remarks to the audience in Davos, Zelensky also said that war came at a huge human price for Ukrainians. The country’s forces, he said, were making gains, notably near the second city of Kharkiv, but “the bloodiest situation remains in Donbas, where we are losing too many people”.

He added that any notion of recovering by force the Crimea peninsula, seized and annexed by Russia in 2014, would cause hundreds of thousands of casualties.