Vladimir Putin may be planning to use Ukraine peace talks as an opportunity to bolster his ailing army before a fresh attack, the British Foreign Secretary has warned.
James Cleverly said the Russian President could pretend to engage in negotiations while actually training more troops and sending more ammunition.
He said there was a risk “a ceasefire is actually just used by Putin to train up more troops and to produce more ammunition and to refit his damaged armed forces and to rearm his armed forces”.
And he urged Western powers to be “very, very careful” if the Russian leader sought negotiations which purported to seek an end to the conflict.
He made his remarks in the wake of US President Joe Biden saying he would be prepared to talk to Mr Putin if he was genuinely looking to end the war.
And French President Emmanuel Macron also said he would carry on speaking to the Russian leader to try to prevent any further escalation and to achieve “very concrete results."
At the start of the war Mr Macron — as well as Germany and Turkey — was one of the only western leaders to maintain dialogue with Putin, despite other European countries severing the relationship.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki slammed the French leader for doing so, saying: "nobody negotiated with Hitler. Mr President Macron, how many times have you negotiated with Putin and what have you achieved? Have you stopped any of the actions that have taken place?"
Mr Cleverly said we need to be cautious that a pause is being utilised by Russia as just a way of making sure that its next phase of aggression is more effective.
He told The Telegraph : “The resolution to this needs to be sustainable, it needs to be meaningful, it needs to be real.
“And look, Vladimir Putin has got form on this. Georgia, that was going to be a one-off, wasn’t it? Crimea, that was going to be a one-off, wasn’t it? Eastern Ukraine, that was going to be a one-off.
“And actually what we saw is they were all building up towards this most latest wave of aggression.”
According to Kyiv’s presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, up to 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since Russia invaded in February.
However, Ukraine previously said that between 100 and 200 of its forces were dying a day on the battlefield, making Podolyak’s estimate seem lower than anticipated.
