Reuters :Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia agreed with US proposals for a ceasefire in Ukraine but any truce would have to deal with the root causes of the conflict and that many crucial details needed to be sorted out.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 has left hundreds of thousands of dead and injured, displaced millions of people, reduced towns to rubble and triggered the sharpest confrontation between Moscow and the West in decades.
Putin’s support — though caveated — for the US ceasefire proposal offers the best chance so far to end the biggest conflict in Europe since World War Two, as Ukraine had also agreed to the proposal at talks earlier in the week.
“We agree with the proposals to cease hostilities,” Putin told reporters at a news conference in the Kremlin following talks with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
“The idea itself is correct, and we certainly support it. But we proceed from the fact that this cessation should be such that it would lead to long-term peace and would eliminate the original causes of this crisis.”
Putin thanked US President Donald Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker for his efforts to end the war, which both Moscow and Washington now cast as a deadly proxy war which could have escalated into World War Three.
Trump had said in the White House on Wednesday that he hoped the Kremlin would agree to the US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire that Ukraine said it would support, to end what Trump called the “bloodbath”.
“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.”
