US Hopes for Ukraine Peace Deal as Putin Seems in No Hurry

Russia has set out maximalist demands for any agreement, including an end to arms supplies for Ukraine, a position that Kyiv and its allies have rejected. The White House, which briefly halted the vital weapons deliveries earlier this month to put pressure on Ukraine, hasn’t agreed to any limits so far, the people said.

“We are working for a ceasefire and a lasting peace,” White House spokesman Brian Hughes said. “We won’t have the terms of discussions or timing be played out in the media.”

European officials fear that Trump’s desire for a diplomatic triumph will lead him to sacrifice Ukraine’s interests, agreeing to terms that leave the country vulnerable to future Russian attacks. They argue that Putin is playing for time to extract more concessions from Trump and more advances on the battlefield.

“So far, Russia is imitating the negotiations, talking about a possible peace and possible ceasefire, but they are not even ready to keep the ceasefire as promised not to attack, not to strike critical infrastructure,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda told Bloomberg Television in Brussels Friday.

Russia has recently ramped up drone attacks on Ukrainian cities ahead of the ceasefire talks. At least three people were killed, including a five-year-old girl and her father, in drone strikes on high-rise apartment buildings in the capital, Kyiv, early Sunday morning, the city’s mayor said. Kyiv’s forces have also kept up air assaults on Russia, including strikes on a military airbase and a command center. In the past day alone, Russia’s Defense Minister said it shot down 224 Ukrainian drones.

“New decisions and new pressure on Moscow are needed to bring an end to these strikes and this war,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday, calling for tighter sanctions on Russia.

The Saudi talks will cover technical details of implementing and monitoring the 30-day truce on strikes against energy sites that the Russian and Ukrainian presidents agreed to in separate phone calls with Trump last week. The discussions will also focus on potentially expanding the ceasefire to cover shipping in the Black Sea.

The meetings will be the first to involve Russia and Ukraine in parallel talks on ending the conflict since the sides met in Istanbul in March 2022, a month after Russia’s full-scale invasion, for negotiations that failed to reach an agreement. Turkey and the United Nations mediated talks on continuing a grain-export deal from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports in 2022-2023 that collapsed when Russia withdrew.

Zelenskiy said Kyiv is ready to be “concrete and very fast in the talks.” He’s sending his defense minister and two top presidential aides and hoping to hammer out a list of targets to be covered by the limited ceasefire.

But Putin is sending lower-level officials, including a security service veteran who’s especially disliked in Kyiv for his role at the start of the war. They’re tasked with discussing general issues, according to a person familiar with the Kremlin’s thinking.

“These are relatively technical people who can ensure the talks aren’t rushed, to slow Trump down,” said Mikhail Vinogradov, head of the St. Petersburg Politics Foundation, a think tank.

The Kremlin won’t agree to a summit between Trump and Putin – something the US president has repeatedly predicted will happen soon – until a comprehensive peace deal is reached, according to people familiar with the leadership’s thinking. That’s not likely by mid-April, they said.

Last week’s two-hour phone call between Putin and Trump was a step toward an in-person meeting, said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Only after concrete developments, joint understandings and agreements are reached at a technical level can the presidents talk more specifically about the prospects for a meeting, he said in an interview on state TV published on Telegram.

“I don’t see any reason to think that Russia is in a hurry to get to a ceasefire,” said Kristine Berzina, a managing director at the German Marshall Fund in Washington.

“If it seals the deal with the US, it’s going to be harder for Russia to maintain the relationships it has with China, with Iran and with North Korea and that’s not a step that Russia is going to take lightly,” she said.

In a sign of the depth of those ties, Putin dispatched a top security aide to North Korea on Friday to brief Kim Jong Un, who’s provided critical supplies of arms and troops for Russia’s war effort.

Despite Putin’s sweeping demands in the talks so far, Trump understands that any deal must be acceptable to Kyiv in order to succeed and thus isn’t prepared to concede too much, according to people familiar with the US position. The US also wouldn’t agree to a summit until a lasting ceasefire deal is in place, they said.