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1 week Ago By Nicholas Cecil
Vladimir Putin wants Volodymyr Zelensky to make the first move on direct peace talks to end Russia ’s war in Ukraine , says the Kremlin . The possibility of direct talks between the two sides was raised during a three-hour meeting between the Russian president and US envoy Steve Witkoff last week. Russia and Ukraine have not held direct negotiations since March 2022, shortly after Putin launched his war.
Later that year, Ukraine’s president adopted a decree that ruled out negotiations with Putin, after Russia claimed four regions of the country as its own territory. Mr Zelensky, who met Donald Trump on the sidelines of Pope Francis’ funeral on Saturday, has said Kyiv would be ready to hold talks with Moscow once a ceasefire starts. Asked if the signal for direct talks should come from Ukraine or the US, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “Well, from Kyiv, at least Kyiv should take some actions in this regard.
They have a legal ban on this. But so far we don’t see any action.” The two sides are under intense pressure from America to find a settlement to the end the war, the deadliest in Europe since World War Two.
The US president urged Russia on Sunday to stop firing missiles into civilian areas in Ukraine and suggested Mr Zelensky was ready to give up Crimea as the price of a peace deal. Speaking to reporters in New Jersey, Trump, who has suggested that Putin may be “stringing him along”, said his one-on-one meeting with Mr Zelensky at the Vatican on Saturday had gone well. Asked if Ukraine’s president might be ready to give up Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula seized by Russia in 2014, as part of a future peace deal with Moscow, Trump said: “Oh, I think so, yeah.
Look, Crimea was 12 years ago.” Such a move would be a major change of stance by Mr Zelensky who has so far steadfastly ruled it out. US proposals on ending the three-year war in Ukraine have called for Washington’s recognition of Moscow’s control over Crimea as well as de facto recognition of Russia’s hold on other parts of Ukraine.
Trump and Mr Zelensky, in Rome for the funeral of Pope Francis, met in a Vatican basilica on Saturday to try to revive faltering efforts to end the war in Ukraine. The meeting was the first between the two leaders since an angry bust-up in the White House Oval Office in February. The US president rebuked Putin after the latest meeting, saying on social media that there is “no reason” for Russia to shoot missiles into civilian areas.
When asked about a Russian strike on Kyiv last week that killed civilians , Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said that “the target attacked was not something absolutely civilian” and claimed Russia targets only “sites which are used by the military”. Ukrainian and European officials have pushed back against the US proposals on how to end the war. German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said on Sunday that Ukraine should not agree to the American proposal, saying it went too far in ceding swathes of territory in return for a ceasefire.
Chuck Schumer, the top US Senate Democrat, said on Sunday that he is concerned Trump will “cave in to Putin” and warned that abandoning Ukraine would be a “moral tragedy”..
