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Russia does not want a temporary ceasefire in Ukraine and is pushing for a long-term peace settlement that will take into account its interests and concerns, a senior aide to Vladimir Putin has said.
Yuri Ushakov, the Russian president’s foreign policy adviser, told state television on Thursday that the 30-day ceasefire proposed after talks between the US and Ukraine this week was “nothing other than a temporary breather for Ukrainian troops”.
“Nobody needs steps that imitate peaceful actions in this situation,” Ushakov said, adding that Moscow “hopes [the US] knows our position and wants to believe that they will take it into account as we work together going forward”.
Russia’s rejection of the US proposal aligned with Putin’s hardline stance ahead of high-level talks later on Thursday in Moscow, where Steve Witkoff, US President Donald Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, has landed.
Those demands would in effect end Ukraine’s existence as a functioning state and place it squarely in Russia’s orbit while severely limiting Nato’s presence east of Germany.
Ushakov said Witkoff, who spoke to Putin last month as the US began extraordinary attempts at a rapprochement with Russia, would not be the White House’s main envoy to Moscow.
The Russian adviser said Washington and Moscow had agreed that any future contacts would be “of a closed nature” and declined to name the envoy.
He said he told US national security adviser Mike Waltz a day earlier that Russia’s goal was “a long-term peace agreement that takes into account . . . our well-known concerns”.
Putin has demanded that Ukraine recognise Russia’s annexation of four partially occupied south-eastern regions and the Crimean peninsula, withdraw its troops from those areas and pledge to never join Nato as preconditions for the ceasefire.
Russia is also pushing for caps on Ukraine’s military, protections for Russian speakers in the country and fresh elections to replace President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
It has demanded an effective rollback of Nato’s eastward expansion since the cold war, which Putin has claimed forced him to order his invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
While the Trump administration has ruled out Ukraine joining Nato and has also said it wants Kyiv to hold fresh elections, it has threatened Russia with future sanctions if Putin does not make concessions.
However, the negotiations come as Russia is making progress in retaking parts of the Kursk region that Ukraine seized in a surprise assault last summer and had hoped to use as a bargaining chip.
On Thursday, Valery Gerasimov, chief of Russia’s general staff, told Putin — who was wearing military fatigues for the first time since the war began — that their forces had captured 400 soldiers and reclaimed 86 per cent of the territory taken by Kyiv.
The US restored military aid and intelligence sharing to Ukraine earlier this week after senior officials held talks in Saudi Arabia over Trump’s ceasefire proposal.
Trump then said Moscow needed to agree to a pause, warning that he could “do things financially that would be very bad for Russia”.
“Hopefully we can get a ceasefire from Russia,” Trump said after meeting Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin on Wednesday. “I’ve gotten some positive messages, but a positive message means nothing. This is a very serious situation.”
Additional reporting by Felicia Schwartz in Washington
