U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at a joint press conference after their summit on July 16, 2018, in Helsinki, Finland.
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U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday agreed on steps toward a total ceasefire and peace deal to end the war in Ukraine, the White House said.
Trump and Putin “agreed that the movement to peace will begin with an energy and infrastructure ceasefire,” according to a White House readout of a call between the two leaders, which lasted at least 90 minutes.
The Kremlin said that Putin agreed on Russia and Ukraine refraining from attacking each other’s energy infrastructure for 30 days.
Putin “immediately” issued an order to that effect to the Russian military after the call, the Kremlin said.
The White House said the two leaders also agreed “technical negotiations on implementation of a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, full ceasefire and permanent peace.”
Those negotiations “will begin immediately in the Middle East,” the White House said in its readout.
The call came more than three years after Russia launched a military invasion of Ukraine on Putin’s order.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last week that Kyiv would agree to a 30-day ceasefire of all hostilities, but only if Russia also signed on.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request to confirm the accuracy of the Kremlin’s summary of the call.
The White House’s readout said that Trump and Putin also “broadly” discussed the Middle East as “a region of potential cooperation to prevent future conflicts.”
“The two leaders agreed that a future with an improved bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia has huge upside,” the readout said. “This includes enormous economic deals and geopolitical stability when peace has been achieved.”
Before the call, Russia was expected to lay out its conditions for a break in the fighting during the call, which could include all weapons shipments to Ukraine being halted, according to unnamed sources cited by Bloomberg.
Trump has signaled that the U.S. could be willing to compromise with Russia, too.
“We will be talking about land. We will be talking about power plants,” Trump told reporters Sunday after being asked about concessions to Moscow in negotiations to end the more than three-year war in Ukraine.
“I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides, Ukraine and Russia. We are already talking about that, dividing up certain assets,” he added, without giving further details.
“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end. Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance,” Trump noted.
Washington recently restarted military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine after a heated clash at the White House between Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Zelenskyy in late February.
Putin last week said that he agreed to the idea in principle while listing caveats and requesting further negotiation.
“The idea [of a ceasefire] itself is correct and we are certainly supporting it, but there are issues that need to be discussed,” he said Thursday, according to an NBC translation.
“I think that we need to talk to our American colleagues and partners,” Putin said. “Maybe call President Trump and discuss it together. But we support the very idea of ending this conflict through peaceful means.”
Putin also said a deal must “lead to long-term peace and eliminate the root causes of this crisis” and questioned both the enforcement of the ceasefire and whether the 30-day pause in fighting would allow Ukraine to “supply weapons” or “train newly mobilized units.”
Zelenskyy skeptical
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Putin’s response to the ceasefire idea was “manipulative.”
“Now we have all heard very predictable, very manipulative words from Putin in response to the idea of silence at the front — he is, in fact, preparing to reject it as of now,” Zelenskyy said in an evening address Thursday.
A ceasefire could give both sides time to consider their terms for a future peace deal. But the distance between the two nations’ priorities is sizeable.
Ukraine fears it could be pushed to concede Russian-occupied territory to Moscow and insists on security guarantees.
Analysts are meanwhile skeptical that Russia will easily agree to a ceasefire or then fully abide by a truce.
Before the full-scale war began in 2022, previous ceasefire agreements to end fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces in the east of the country saw both sides repeatedly accuse each other of violating the agreements.
Ukrainian military man drives on car on September 23, 2024 in Sudzha, Kursk Region, Russia.
Global Images Ukraine | Global Images Ukraine | Getty Images
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko on Monday said that the Kremlin would seek “ironclad security guarantees” in any potential future peace deal that Ukraine would not be allowed to join the Western military alliance NATO and would remain neutral.
“If we talk about a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Ukraine, then, of course, it will have an external outline,” Grushko said an interview with Izvestia that was translated by Google.
“We will demand that cast-iron security guarantees become part of this agreement,” he said. “Because only through their formation will it be possible to achieve lasting peace in Ukraine and generally strengthen regional security.”
He said that one of these conditions should be Ukraine’s neutral status and the refusal of NATO countries to accept Kyiv into the organization.
