Vladimir Putin thinks there are “grounds for optimism” over a 30-day ceasefire deal with Ukraine but added that there is “a lot ahead to be done”.
With Volodymyr Zelenskyy rejecting Moscow’s “manipulative” preconditions and both sides reporting enemy drone attacks overnight, a truce seems further away than it once appeared.
What did the commentators say?
Putin’s conditions are believed to include the demilitarisation of Ukraine, an end to Western military aid and a commitment to keeping Kyiv out of Nato. This was “a no disguised as a yes”, said the BBC, because the terms would be “devastating” for Ukraine to accept.
Russia’s demands are “impossible” for Ukraine, said The Independent, so Kyiv is “likely to see Mr Putin’s stance as an attempt to buy time” while his forces “squeeze the last Ukrainian troops out of western Russia”.
Moscow has “no interest in a ceasefire”, Boris Bondarev, a former Kremlin diplomat, told Politico, because Putin “thinks he can achieve his goals through fighting”. Even Donald Trump’s threats of significant financial consequences might not be enough because Putin’s “not afraid of irritating him”.
Moscow believes Trump is “weak, lacks a core set of principles and may be open to manipulation”, a European intelligence official told The Washington Post. And Putin “has not veered from his maximalist goal of dominating” Ukraine.
But there are “good reasons” for the Kremlin to agree to the ceasefire, Mikhail Komin, a Russian political scientist, said on the Center for European Policy Analysis. It would give Russia “time to replenish its forces” and it could “push” Ukrainian troops out of the Kursk region first, burying Kyiv’s idea of a “territorial exchange”.
Ending a war is “seldom straightforward”, said The Guardian, and as Russia has “a record of violating ceasefires and peace agreements, a robust process is critical”.
That process could require several thousand monitors, “able to communicate and deconflict across both sides” of the front, which is 2,000km (1,250 miles) long. But modern technology, such as drones, airborne and satellite reconnaissance, would make ceasefire monitoring “easier” now than it was in the aftermath of the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015.
What next?
Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff met Putin during his visit to Moscow yesterday, the Kremlin has confirmed, and the two men agreed that the US and Russian presidents will speak to each other. “The exact time of the conversation between the two presidents has not yet been agreed upon,” said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, but there is an “understanding” in both countries that a “conversation between the presidents” is “necessary”.