Trump and Putin to discuss ceasefire as Russia demands Ukraine’s neutrality, Europe poised for peacekeepers
U.S. President Donald Trump said he plans to speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday and discuss ending the war in Ukraine, after talks between U.S. and Russian officials in Moscow.
“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One during a late flight back to the Washington area from Florida. “Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.
“I’ll be speaking to President Putin on Tuesday. A lot of work’s been done over the weekend.”
Trump is trying to win Putin’s support for a 30-day ceasefire proposal that Ukraine accepted last week, as both sides continued trading heavy aerial strikes through the weekend and Russia moved closer to ejecting Ukrainian forces from their months-old foothold in the western Russian region of Kursk.
In separate appearances on Sunday TV shows in the United States, Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, emphasized that there were still challenges to be worked out before Russia agrees to a ceasefire, much less a final peaceful resolution to the war.
Rubio told CBS a final peace deal would “involve a lot of hard work, concessions from both Russia and Ukraine,” and that it would be difficult to even begin those negotiations “as long as they’re shooting at each other.”
In remarks published on Monday, the Russian deputy foreign minister, Alexander Grushko, said that Russia will seek “ironclad” guarantees in any peace deal that NATO nations exclude Kyiv from membership and that Ukraine will remain neutral.
Grushko reiterated to the Russian media outlet Izvestia that any long-lasting peace treaty on Ukraine must meet Moscow’s demands.
“Part of these guarantees should be the neutral status of Ukraine, the refusal of NATO countries to accept it into the alliance.”
In the meantime, Russia insists it will not accept Western forces on Ukrainian soil. However, Britain and France both expressed willingness to send a peacekeeping force to monitor any ceasefire in Ukraine.
“It does not matter under what label NATO contingents were to be deployed on Ukrainian territory: be it the European Union, NATO, or in a national capacity,” Grushko said.
“If they appear there, it means that they are deployed in the conflict zone with all the consequences for these contingents as parties to the conflict,” he said.
“We can talk about unarmed observers, a civilian mission that would monitor the implementation of individual aspects of this agreement, or guarantee mechanisms. In the meantime, it’s just hot air.”
