Ukraine’s president has said he hopes the US will take “strong steps” against Russia if Moscow fails to support a 30-day ceasefire, agreed at a meeting between Ukrainian and US delegations in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.
“I understand that we could count on strong steps. I don’t know the details yet but we are talking about sanctions and about strengthening Ukraine,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
He described Tuesday’s marathon negotiations in Jeddah, between a US delegation led by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and a Ukrainian delegation made up of his chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, and the country’s foreign and defence ministers, as “very positive”.
The talks were an attempt to repair relations after a disastrous White House meeting between Zelenskyy and Donald Trump two weeks ago.
In Moscow, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said Russia was awaiting detailed information from Washington about what was discussed in Jeddah and that Vladimir Putin must first be briefed by the US before deciding whether the proposal would be acceptable to Russia.
He added that the Kremlin could organise a call between Putin and Donald Trump at short notice if needed.
Rubio confirmed the US would have contact with Russia on Wednesday about the ceasefire agreement reached with Ukraine, though stopped short of spelling out what consequences Russia might face if it did not agree.
“We all eagerly await the Russian response and urge them strongly to consider ending all hostilities,” Rubio said during a stop in Ireland. “If they say no, then obviously we’ll have to examine everything and sort of figure out where we stand in the world and what their true intentions are.”
The White House Middle East envoy and close Trump ally, Steve Witkoff, is expected to travel to Moscow this week for a meeting with the Russian leader, though the Kremlin has yet to confirm this.
Zelenskyy said the Ukrainians had come to the table in Saudi Arabia with a suggestion for a 30-day ceasefire in the air and at sea, during which details of a more lasting settlement could be discussed. However, the Americans proposed a full ceasefire, which was agreed after calls made by the two delegations to their respective presidents.
He said that while monitoring sea and air ceasefires would be easy, he hoped Ukraine’s western partners would provide a plan for how to monitor a ceasefire along the frontline, “given who we are dealing with and given our experience of the past years”.
Some Russian officials in Moscow indicated scepticism about the prospect of a ceasefire, saying that Moscow was unwilling to stop the fighting as its forces this week made rapid gains in reclaiming territory in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukraine launched a surprise incursion last year. On Wednesday, Russian forces entered the central square of Sudzha, the largest Russian settlement controlled by Ukraine.
“Russia is advancing [on the battlefield] … Any agreements must be on our terms, not American ones … Washington should understand this as well,” the senior Russian senator Konstantin Kosachev wrote on Telegram.
Ruslan Leviev, the founder of the Conflict Intelligence Team, an open-source investigation unit, said Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region appeared to be conducting a controlled withdrawal, ceding their positions without resistance.
“All areas gradually coming under the control of Russian forces [and] have been taken with little to no resistance. It can already be said that the entire city of Sudzha is now under Russian control,” Leviev said.
Zelenskyy also appeared to hint at an organised withdrawal in his comments on Wednesday. “The military command is doing what it should do – saving the maximum number of lives of our soldiers,” he said.
Last month, in an interview with the Guardian, Zelenskyy said Ukraine hoped to swap the territory it held in Kursk region for areas of Ukraine occupied by Russia.
Putin has repeatedly rejected the possibility of a temporary ceasefire, saying that he was focused on addressing what he calls the “root causes” of the conflict. Earlier this year, he told Russia’s security council that there “should not be a short truce, not some kind of respite for regrouping forces and rearmament with the aim of subsequently continuing the conflict, but a long-term peace”.
Instead, the Russian leader has set out a list of maximalist demands to end his invasion, including Ukraine forgoing Nato membership, undergoing partial demilitarisation, and ceding full control of the four Ukrainian regions Putin claimed in 2022.
On Wednesday, Fyodor Lukyanov, a prominent Russian foreign policy analyst who heads a council that advises the Kremlin, wrote that a ceasefire agreement “contradicts” Moscow’s repeatedly stated position that no truce will take place until the foundations of lasting peace are determined.
“In other words, we fight until a comprehensive settlement framework is developed,” Lukyanov concluded.
Still, an outright rejection of the ceasefire by Putin would risk angering Trump and undermining their warm relationship, which has led the US administration to adopt a fundamentally different approach to Moscow compared with Europe.
Reacting to the change in US policy, European leaders have rushed to come up with possible mechanisms to support Ukraine after a potential ceasefire, with efforts to put together a peacekeeping force led by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and UK prime minister, Keir Starmer.
However, details of how a peacekeeping mission might look and what its rules of engagement would be are still up in the air, and there is no sign that Russia would sign on to any deal that involved the deployment of such troops to Ukraine.
Russia’s longtime foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in an interview this week with a group of far-right bloggers from the US, reiterated that Moscow would not accept western peacekeepers in Ukraine as security guarantees “under any conditions”.
Ukraine has said it will need some kind of security guarantee in order to sign a lasting ceasefire deal, and the US has so far declared that it is unwilling to provide one.
On Wednesday, Zelenskyy said discussions on the topic would continue. “We will talk in more detail about security guarantees if the ceasefire holds for 30 days,” he said.
