Putin Lists Conditions To Support US Ceasefire Proposal With Ukraine
Putin said that talks could offer a real chance to end the biggest conflict in Europe since World War Two given Ukraine has already agreed to the proposal.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia on Thursday says Russia will support the US proposal for a ceasefire in Ukraine with condition that any truce would have to address the root causes of the conflict and many crucial details needed to be sorted out.
Putin’s heavily caveated support for the US ceasefire proposal looked designed to signal goodwill to Washington and to open the door to further talks with US President Donald Trump.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has left hundreds of thousands of dead and injured, displaced millions of people, reduced towns to rubble and triggered the sharpest confrontation between Moscow and the West in decades.
Putin said that talks could offer a real chance to end the biggest conflict in Europe since World War Two given Ukraine has already agreed to the proposal.
He went on to list a slew of issues he said needed clarifying and thanked US President Donald Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, for his efforts to end the war which both Moscow and Washington now cast as a deadly proxy war which could have escalated into World War Three.
Trump, who said he was willing to talk to the Russian leader by phone, called Putin’s statement very promising but said it was not complete and that he hoped Moscow would do the right thing.
Trump said Steve Witkoff, his special envoy, was engaged in serious talks with the Russians in Moscow around the US proposal.
Putin portrays the conflict as part of an existential battle with a declining and decadent West which he says humiliated Russia after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 by enlarging the NATO military alliance and encroaching on what he considers Moscow’s sphere of influence, including Ukraine.
