By Guy Faulconbridge and Dmitry Antonov
MOSCOW (Reuters) -The Kremlin said on Wednesday it was awaiting details from Washington about a proposal for a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine while senior Moscow sources said a deal would have to take account of Russia’s advances and address its concerns.
After Russian forces advanced in 2024, U.S. President Donald Trump reversed U.S. policy on the war, launching bilateral talks with Moscow and suspending military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, saying it must agree to terms to end the conflict.
The United States agreed on Tuesday to resume military aid and intelligence sharing after Kyiv said it was ready to support a ceasefire proposal during talks in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah.
The Kremlin said it was carefully studying the results of the meeting and would await details from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House National Security Adviser Mike Waltz.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov suggested a reporter was getting “a little ahead” of himself by asking if Russia intends to tie a ceasefire proposal to the lifting of international sanctions imposed over the war in Ukraine.
“Rubio and Waltz said that they would pass on detailed information to us through various channels about the essence of the conversation that took place in Jeddah. First, we must receive this information,” Peskov said.
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.
President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that he is ready to talk about an end to the war and Trump says he thinks Putin wants to end the war, though other Western leaders say they do not believe Putin.
Trump said on Tuesday that he hoped Russia would agree to a ceasefire and that he would talk to Putin this week.
Reuters reported in November that Putin was ready to negotiate a deal with Trump, but would refuse to make major territorial concessions and would insist Kyiv abandon ambitions to join NATO.
CEASEFIRE ‘TRAP’?
A senior Russian source told Reuters that Putin would find it hard to agree to the ceasefire idea without hashing out terms and getting 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.”
The 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.
“So yes, we are in favour of a truce with both hands, but we need at least framework guarantees and at least from the United States,” said the source.
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 United States had agreed to resume military aid and intelligence sharing and had decorated that move with a ceasefire proposal.
Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the international affairs committee of the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia’s parliament, said on Telegram that Russia’s advances in Ukraine must be taken into account.
“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,” he said.
WAR OR PEACE?
Putin has repeatedly said that a short-term truce is not the way to end the war.
“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.
In June, he had set out his terms for peace: Ukraine must officially drop its NATO ambitions and withdraw its troops from the entirety of the territory of four Ukrainian regions claimed and mostly controlled by Russia.
Russia controls just under a fifth of Ukraine, or about 113,000 square km, while Ukraine controls a shrinking sliver of western Russia, according to open source maps of the war and Russian estimates.
Russia controls 75% of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions and more than 99% of Luhansk region, according to Russian estimates.
Russia says all of those four regions are now legally part of Russia and 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.
(Additional reporting by Reuters in Moscow and Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Tom Hogue and Philippa Fletcher)
