president Putin has announced a three-day ceasefire in Ukraine next week as the Kremlin insisted it was ready for peace talks “without preconditions”.
The temporary truce will take place on May 8-10, according to the Kremlin, which said Russia was ready to respond to any Ukrainian “violations” of it. The ceasefire would cover May 9, which Russia celebrates as Victory Day to mark the end of the Second World War.
“During this period, all military actions will cease. Russia believes that the Ukrainian side should follow this example,” the Kremlin said.
In response, President Zelensky of Ukraine said the world did not want to wait until May 8. “For some reason, everyone is supposed to wait for May 8 and only then have a ceasefire to ensure calm for Putin during the parade,” he said in his nightly video address.
“We value people’s lives and not parades. We believe that the world believes that there is no reason to wait for May 8. And the ceasefire should be not for a few days only to resume the killing afterwards.”
The Kremlin’s announcement effectively confirms there will not be a truce until the ceasefire takes effect, ruling out a peace deal in time for President Trump’s 100th day in office on Tuesday.
Trump, meanwhile, will continue to press for a permanent ceasefire, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said. She added that he was increasingly frustrated with Putin and Zelensky, saying that both should come to the negotiating table to end the war.
President Trump said earlier he believed that his Ukrainian counterpart was ready to cede Crimea to Russia as part of any peace deal, as negotiations entered what Washington called a critical week.
“Oh, I think so,” Trump told reporters in Bedminster, New Jersey, when asked whether he thought President Zelensky was ready to “give up” the Black Sea peninsula which Russia seized in 2014 — despite the Ukrainian leader repeatedly saying he never would
Trump said he was “very disappointed” with Russian strikes on Ukraine
Ukraine would need to change its constitution to cede Crimea or any other land to Russia, which would require a national referendum.
Trump also stepped up pressure on President Putin, saying he should “stop shooting” and sign an agreement to end the war, which is the biggest in Europe since 1945.
When asked if he trusted Putin, he said “I’ll let you know in about two weeks”.
Putin told General Valery Gerasimov, right, that the success of the Kremlin’s army had brought “the rout of the neo-Nazi regime closer”
ALEXANDER KAZAKOV/SPUTNIK/KREMLIN/EPA
Trump’s comments came a day after he met Zelensky during the funeral of Pope Francis, breaking the ice after a major row between the US and Ukrainian leaders at the White House in February.
But as the pair huddled this weekend at St Peter’s Basilica to discuss peace in Ukraine, Putin spoke of war in a video call with his top general.
Hailing what he claimed was the complete eviction of Ukrainian forces from western Russia’s Kursk region, Putin told General Valery Gerasimov that the success of the Russian army had brought “the rout of the neo-Nazi regime closer”. His comments were made shortly after a Russian ballistic missile killed at least 12 people in Kyiv early on Thursday.
Putin’s false depiction of Ukraine as a Nazi state was nothing new and neither was
Russia’s bombardment of Kyiv. Yet the tone of his remarks and the timing of the attack jarred with Moscow’s comments in recent days about being “ready for a deal”, albeit with what Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, called some “fine tuning”.
“There is currently insufficient pressure on Russia from the world to end this war,” Zelensky said on Sunday. Even
Trump, who has favoured Putin more than Zelensky, mused in a social media post that the Russian leader might be planning to continue the war and that he may be “just tapping me along”.
The US president might be right. Trump’s peace proposals fail to meet several of Russia’s key demands, including a permanent ban on Nato membership for Kyiv, limits on the size of its armed forces and the removal of Zelensky’s government, according to a copy of the document seen by Reuters.
Although under the proposals the United States would recognise Russian rule in Crimea, which the Kremlin annexed in 2014, and leave Moscow in de facto control of a swathe of Ukrainian land, Putin might be hard pressed to convince his people that the dreadful cost of the war was worth such relatively meagre returns. He has described the war as a “sacred” battle for Russia’s future, rather than a land grab.
Yet even
if Putin is preparing to halt his invasion, there are no indications that he has given up on his long-term plans for Ukraine, said Fyodor Lukyanov, the head of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defence Policy think tank.
“[Putin’s] aims have not gone anywhere, but the means and the schedule can be changed. A single [military] campaign is not always enough to achieve goals — this is well known from history,” he told The Times.
Lukyanov, who moderates an annual foreign policy discussion with the Russian leader, said that no peace deal could be perfect and there was no guarantee that it would not eventually fail to satisfy either Russia or Ukraine. “And then the fighting will resume,” he said.
Lavrov said on Monday that international recognition of Russian rule in Crimea, plus the other four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine that are under Moscow’s control was “imperative” for any peace deal.
Trump’s reported peace plan said only that Washington would legally recognise Russia’s ownership of Crimea, while de facto accepting its control over the Russian-occupied parts of the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions.
“We remain open to negotiations. But the ball is not in our court. So far, Kyiv has not demonstrated its ability to negotiate,” Lavrov told Brazilian media. He also said that Russia still aimed to “demilitarise and denazify” Ukraine.
Zelensky has said Ukraine will only sit down for talks on territory with Moscow after a total ceasefire across the entire 600-mile front.
In Kyiv, it is hard to find anyone who believes that Putin will ever abandon his attempt to destroy Ukraine as an independent country.
Three people were killed on Sunday in Russian airstrikes on Kostiantynivka in the Donetsk region, while a man was killed and a 14-year-old girl was injured in Pavlohrad, a city in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Lavrov also told CBS that Russia would continue to target civilian infrastructure if it believed it was being used for military purposes.
Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister until last year, sought to dampen hopes that Trump could achieve a quick end to the conflict.
“We are not even close to real negotiations on the end of the war,” he said, adding that a ceasefire was still as far away as when Trump came to power in January. “And in terms of ending the war, we are where we were last autumn,” he told Ukrainian media.
Zelensky is also likely to encounter resistance within Ukraine if he signs a deal that is seen as bad for the country. Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, the commander of a Ukraine drone brigade, has warned that “a million” disgruntled soldiers will return from the front to cause “trouble” for Kyiv if they believe Zelensky is acting against “the interests of the Ukrainian people.” He also predicted that the war would not be over by the new year.
Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, warned again that Washington could walk away from peace negotiations.
“We have to [determine] whether this is an endeavour that we want to continue to be involved in,” he told NBC. “There are reasons to be optimistic, but there are reasons to be realistic… We’re close, but we’re not close enough.”
Trump’s efforts to broker a deal between Ukraine and Russia were entering a “critical week”, Rubio said.
Georgy Bovt, a Russian political analyst, said that while Trump may believe the positions of Kyiv and Moscow were getting closer, “in reality they are far apart”. “Even Moscow’s proposal to resume direct negotiations with Ukraine, without preconditions, does not mean anything yet, since negotiations can be resumed and then conducted for years without any result,” he told Moscow’s BFM radio station.
Putin could also face a backlash if he ends the fighting on terms that are seen as unacceptable to hardliners. “[Trump’s plan] suggests that Russia simply surrenders, and Ukraine, in addition to Nato, would receive everything it wanted, except for actual control over Crimea and the already liberated territories,” wrote Kirill Fyodorov, a pro-war Russian blogger with half a million followers, referring to the areas of eastern and southern Ukraine that are under Russia’s control.
However, Lukyanov said that Putin would be reluctant to wreck relations with Trump because he was looking at a wider picture than just the war. He said: “Putin is interested in co-operation with Trump not so much because of Ukraine, but as an element of participating in the general process of global change. Some level of mutual understanding with the US is important.”
Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian political analyst who has long argued that Putin will continue the war until he has subjugated Ukraine, said she now believed he could agree to a peace deal.
“However, Putin has not renounced his broader objectives in Ukraine. Any agreement would be a tactical manoeuvre — an investment in a transitional period during which Ukraine would be forced to cease resistance,” she wrote on X.
