By Guy Faulconbridge and Andrew Osborn
MOSCOW (Reuters) -President Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy aide said on Thursday a 30-day ceasefire proposed by the United States to pause the war in Ukraine would give Russia “nothing” while gifting Kyiv’s forces a much-needed battlefield respite.
Russian forces have been advancing since mid-2024 and control nearly a fifth of Ukraine’s territory, three years after sending tens of thousands of troops into its neighbour in a war that U.S. President Donald Trump has said he will halt.
Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in Moscow on Thursday for talks. Russian officials said U.S. national security adviser Mike Waltz had provided details on the ceasefire idea on Wednesday and Russia was ready to discuss it.
Trump had said in the White House on Wednesday that he hoped the Kremlin would agree to the U.S. proposal for a 30-day ceasefire that Ukraine said it would support.
Yuri Ushakov, a former ambassador to Washington who speaks for Putin on major foreign policy issues, told Russian state TV that he had spoken to Waltz on Wednesday to outline Russia’s position on the ceasefire.
“I stated our position that this is nothing other than a temporary respite for the Ukrainian military, nothing more,” Ushakov said.
“It gives us nothing. It only gives the Ukrainians an opportunity to regroup, gain strength and to continue the same thing,” he later added, saying he felt the proposal needed to be updated to take account of Russia’s interests.
Ushakov, who has served alongside Putin in the Kremlin since 2012, stopped short of rejecting the U.S. proposal outright, however, saying the president would likely speak to the media later on Thursday and outline Russia’s position in more detail.
Ushakov said Moscow’s goal was “a long-term peaceful settlement that takes into account the legitimate interests of our country and our well-known concerns.”
“It seems to me that no one needs any steps that (merely) imitate peaceful actions in this situation,” he said, making clear he thought that the Europeans were trying to put Moscow in a position where it looked, wrongly, as if Russia was against peace.
The remarks from such a senior Kremlin official indicate that Putin, Russia’s paramount leader since 1999, thinks that Russia’s advances on the battlefield in Ukraine and in western Russia give Moscow a strong hand in peace negotiations.
It was unclear how Trump would react though, after saying on Wednesday that he hoped Moscow would agree to a ceasefire to end the “bloodbath” and that in his first term he had been tougher on Russia than other presidents.
“I can do things financially that would be very bad for Russia,” Trump said. “I don’t want to do that because I want to get peace. I want to see peace and we’ll see. But in a financial sense, yeah, we could do things very bad for Russia. It would be devastating for Russia.”
Trump has sought to rebuild relations with Russia to avoid an escalation of the Ukraine war that he says could develop into World War Three, though he has also held out both the threat of more sanctions and the prospect of lifting sanctions if Moscow seeks to end the war.
KREMLIN HARDBALL
Just hours after Trump spoke in Washington, the Kremlin published footage of Putin dressed in a green camouflage uniform visiting the Kursk region of western Russia where Ukraine is set to lose its foothold after a major offensive by Russian forces.
Putin, a former KGB officer, very rarely wears military outfits. The Kremlin said that Russia’s supreme commander in chief had deemed it necessary to wear the military fatigues.
The United States agreed on Tuesday to resume weapons supplies and intelligence sharing with Ukraine after Kyiv said at talks in Saudi Arabia that it was ready to support a ceasefire proposal.
But Russia has been advancing on the battlefield despite the hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. and European aid to Ukraine, whose forces are being pushed out of the western Russian region of Kursk.
Beyond the immediate ceasefire idea, Russia has presented the U.S. with a list of demands for a deal to end its war against Ukraine and reset relations with Washington, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Asked about the Reuters report, Ushakov said Washington knew Russia’s position.
In an attempt to divert Russian forces from eastern Ukraine, gain a bargaining chip and embarrass Putin, Ukraine smashed across the border into the Kursk region in August, the biggest attack on Russian territory since the Nazi invasion of 1941.
Ukraine now has a sliver of less than 200 square km (77 square miles) in Kursk, down from 1,300 square km (500 square miles) at the peak of the incursion last summer, according to the Russian military.
(Reporting by Reuters; editing by Guy Faulconbridge, Michael Perry, Toby Chopra, Philippa Fletcher and Sharon Singleton)
