Putin not likely to accept Ukraine ceasefire idea, sources say

Moscow — President Vladimir Putin is unlikely to embrace a US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine, Russian sources said on Wednesday, adding that any agreement would have to take Russian battlefield advances into account and address Moscow's concerns.

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has left hundreds of thousands of dead and injured, displaced millions of people and triggered the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

US President Donald Trump has reversed previous US policy on Russia, opening up bilateral talks with Moscow and suspending military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, saying it must agree to terms to end the war.

The US agreed on Tuesday to resume military aid and intelligence sharing after Kyiv said it was ready to support a ceasefire proposal.

A senior Russian source told Reuters that Russia would need to hash out the terms of any ceasefire and get some sort of guarantees.

“It is difficult for Putin to agree to this in its current form,” the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation, told Reuters. “Putin has a strong position because Russia is advancing.”

Russia controls just under a fifth of Ukraine, about 113,000km² and has been edging forward for months. Ukraine seized a sliver of western Russia in August as a bargaining chip, but its grip there is weakening, according to open source maps of the war and Russian estimates.

The Russian source said that without guarantees alongside a ceasefire, Russia’s position could swiftly become weaker and that Russia could then be blamed by the West for failing to end the war.

Another senior Russian source said that the ceasefire proposal looked from Moscow’s perspective to be a trap because Putin would find it hard to halt the war without some concrete guarantees or pledges.

A third Russian source said the big picture was that the US had agreed to resume military aid and intelligence sharing and had decorated that move with a ceasefire proposal.

The Kremlin has yet to comment.

War and peace

Putin has repeatedly ruled out a short-term ceasefire.

“We don’t need a truce, we need a long-term peace secured by guarantees for the Russian Federation and its citizens. It is a difficult question how to ensure these guarantees,” he said in December.

He told the security council, a type of modern-day politburo, on January 20 that there “should not be a short truce, not some kind of respite for regrouping forces and rearmament with the aim of subsequently continuing the conflict, but a long-term peace”.

In June last year, Putin set out his terms for peace: Ukraine must officially drop its Nato ambitions and withdraw its troops from all of the territory of four Ukrainian regions claimed and now mostly controlled by Russia.

Russia controls 75% of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions and more than 99% of Luhansk region, according to Russian estimates.

Russia says the entirety of those four regions are now legally part of Russia and that they will never be returned to Ukraine, which says they have been illegally annexed and that it will never recognise Russian sovereignty over them.

The conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014 after a Russia-friendly president was toppled in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and Russia annexed Crimea, with Russian-backed separatist forces fighting Ukraine’s armed forces.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, in an interview given on Tuesday but published on Wednesday, said that Russia would not accept Nato member troops “under any flag, in any capacity, on Ukrainian soil”.

Russia’s Rossiya 24 state television said that US secretary of state Marco Rubio’s remarks about Ukraine being ready to talk appeared “rather naive”, given the history of Kyiv’s relations with Russia, while an influential Russian legislator said any peace would be on Moscow’s terms.

“Russia is advancing [in Ukraine], and therefore it will be different with Russia,” said Konstantin Kosachev, chair of the international affairs committee of the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia’s parliament, in a post on Telegram.

“Any agreements — with all the understanding of the need for compromise — on our terms, not on American. And this is not boasting, but understanding that real agreements are still being written there, at the front. Which they should understand in Washington, too.”

Reuters