US President Donald Trump said he plans to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday and discuss ending the war in Ukraine, following positive talks between US and Russian officials in Moscow, on Monday, the 17th of March, reports Reuters.
“I will speak to President Putin on Tuesday. A lot of work has been done over the weekend,” Trump told reporters on board Air Force One on a late return flight from Florida to Washington.
“We want to see if we can end this war. Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance,” Trump said.
Trump is seeking Putin’s agreement to a 30-day ceasefire proposal accepted by Ukraine and the US last week. Both sides continued to carry out heavy airstrikes over the weekend and Russia moved closer to pushing Ukrainian forces out of a months-long foothold in Russia’s western Kursk region.
ASKED WHAT CONCESSIONS WERE BEING CONSIDERED IN THE CEASEFIRE TALKS, TRAMP SAID “WE WILL TALK ABOUT LAND. WE WILL TALK ABOUT POWER PLANTS.”
“I think both sides, Ukraine and Russia, have already discussed a lot of this. We are already talking about it in terms of sharing certain assets.”
Trump has changed US policy by moving closer to Moscow, saying it is harder to work with Ukraine than with Russia. His tense meeting with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy last month ended with the Ukrainian leader leaving the White House abruptly.
Now that Ukraine has agreed to a ceasefire, Russia is under pressure to comply with Trump’s demands and will test the US President’s more accommodating attitude towards Putin, who launched Russia’s invasion of Ukraine three years ago.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Russian media Izvestiya, which did not mention the ceasefire proposal, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said that any lasting peace agreement on Ukraine must meet Moscow’s demands.
“WE WILL DEMAND THAT IRONCLAD SECURITY GUARANTEES BE PART OF THIS TREATY,”
Grushko was quoted by Izvestiya as saying. “Part of these guarantees should be Ukraine’s neutral status, the refusal of NATO countries to accept Ukraine into the alliance.”
Britain and France have said they are ready to send peacekeepers to monitor the ceasefire in Ukraine. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his country was also open to this.
“It does not matter under what label NATO forces are deployed on Ukrainian territory, whether they are European Union, NATO or national forces,” Grushko said. “If they arrive there, it means that they are deployed in a conflict zone with all the consequences that this entails for these forces as parties to the conflict.”
Grushko said that Kyiv’s allies in Europe must understand that for the security of the region, Ukraine must be kept outside NATO and foreign troops must not be deployed there, and only “then will the security of Ukraine and the whole region be ensured, because one of the root causes of the conflict will be eliminated”.
He said that the deployment of unarmed observers after the conflict could only be discussed once a peace agreement was in place.