After last night's meeting with Merkel, Putin has met with leaders at a bigger breakfast meeting:
Russian President Vladimir Putin held a breakfast meeting with European leaders and Ukraine's Petro Poroshenko on October 17 after failing to bridge differences over the Ukraine crisis in late-night talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
A two-day Europe-Asia summit in Milan is being overshadowed by the crisis in Ukraine, where deadly fighting persists in the east despite a cease-fire between government forces and pro-Russian separatists the West says are supported by Russian troops and weaponry.
The breakfast meeting was attended by Putin, Merkel, and Poroshenko as well as French President Francois Hollande, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and outgoing EU leaders Herman Van Rompuy and Jose Manuel Barroso.
Images from a lengthy Putin-Merkel meeting that stretched past midnight showed the two facing each other across a table, their faces unsmiling.
The Kremlin said they still had "serious differences of opinion about the genesis of the internal Ukrainian conflict as well as about the causes of what is happening there now."
Barring any major developments that concludes the live blogging for today.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that Europe faces "major transit risks" to natural gas supplies from Russia this winter.
Putin told reporters in Belgrade on October 16 that if Ukraine siphons off natural gas without permission from transit pipelines to the European Union, Russia “will consecutively reduce the stolen volume at the cost of supplies."
Putin made the remarks ahead of talks in Milan on October 16 and 17 with EU leaders and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
Russia raised the price it charges Kyiv for natural gas after Ukraine's pro-Russia Preident Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in February, then halted gas supplies to Ukraine in June when Kyiv failed to pay the higher price.
The price standoff is the third between Moscow and Kyiv since 2006.
Russia is the EU's biggest gas supplier, providing about a third of the gas consumed there.
As the tweeter says, this video is worth watching: