Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to halt strikes on Ukraine energy targets for 30 days, Kremlin said after call with United States (US) President Donald Trump.
Poland leader Volodymyr Zelensky said he supports the energy truce but insisted Russia isn’t “ready” to end the war, in his first response to the call.
The Russian President, however, set out several conditions for a fuller ceasefire during the 90 minute call, including that any settlement should “eliminate the root causes of the crisis”, the Kremlin said.
Fresh Ukraine peace talks will also begin in the Middle East immediately, the White House said.
Zelensky backs energy truce, but says Russia isn’t ‘ready’ to end war
Zelensky has provided his first response to Trump and Putin’s phone call.
The Ukrainian leader, who has been speaking in Finland, said that he supports the proposal for a 30-day energy truce, but he needs more “details”.
“We’ve always supported the idea of not attacking energy [infrastructure] with any weapons,” he told a news conference in Helsinki.
But, he said, Putin’s terms for peace show that Russia is not “ready” to end the war in full.
Kremlin statement places major condition on peace negotiations
The statement from the White House on Trump’s call with Putin suggested the US President has backed down on his demand for an immediate ground, air and sea truce.
Instead, Putin has agreed to halt long-range missile strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
This was, in fact, a Ukrainian proposal that the Americans side-stepped a week ago.
Trump and Putin also appear to have agreed to immediate technical-level talks toward a longer-term settlement. The Kremlin said this must be “complex, stable and long-term in nature”.
However, it’s not clear if this means further talks between the US and Russia or bilateral negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.
But, crucially, Putin has placed a major condition on this – one that is existential for Ukraine.
The Kremlin statement read that a key stipulation for “preventing the escalation of the conflict and working toward its resolution” should be “the complete cessation of foreign military aid and sharing intelligence with Kyiv”.
Putin has already tasted Trump’s readiness to cut off US support to Ukraine, and is trying to get him to repeat it – while tossing the ball back to Kyiv to agree to a far more limited truce than Trump had demanded they sign up to.
