Iran

Tehran, Thursday, September 24, 2026. The Iranian press reported on Wednesday the confirmation by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio of the invitation addressed by Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin for the G20 summit scheduled for December in Miami. Tabnak, citing the Fars agency, highlights a detail that other dispatches have been silent about: the meeting is to be held "at the American president's golf club", a location already mentioned by rumors as early as April. Rubio justifies the invitation as follows: "To resolve problems, you have to meet with people you disagree with." He says he hopes Putin "accepts this invitation" and recalls that Trump had also mentioned, in September 2025, the possibility of inviting Chinese President Xi Jinping to the same meeting.

On the Russian side, Mehr News, via the TASS agency, reports the position of a Kremlin spokesman who rules out any concrete announcement of an immediate bilateral meeting: "There is no precise information about a high-level meeting. If it's a Russian-American meeting, the president is ready." The same spokesman recalls that Putin and Trump have "always emphasized, during their phone conversations, their willingness to organize a new meeting if necessary".

Mehr News and Khabar Online detail the meeting held on Wednesday in New York, on the sidelines of the 81st UN General Assembly, between Sergei Lavrov and Marco Rubio: a closed-door interview, without an initial statement to the press, the first since their meeting in July in Manila, on the sidelines of ASEAN, which had lasted barely thirty minutes. Khabar Online specifies that the TASS agency had, at the time of publication, not yet released any details about the exact content of the Lavrov-Rubio meeting.

On the Ukrainian front, Asr Iran and YJC relay the speech by Volodymyr Zelensky at the UN podium, where the Ukrainian president announces a "very difficult winter" and claims that Putin is targeting Ukrainian territory beyond just the Donbass. Zelensky also claims that Russia has mobilized citizens from 47 countries, citing Ghana, Nepal, Tajikistan, India, China, Cuba, Belarus, Yemen, and South Africa, and warns against an extension of the conflict to NATO member countries.