Russia agrees to partial Ukraine ceasefire after Trump-Putin call – National

Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump agreed on Tuesday to a limited 30-day ceasefire against energy infrastructure targets in Ukrainewhile talks aimed at advancing toward a broader peace plan will begin “immediately,” the White House said.

Putin ordered the Russian military to stop strikes against energy facilities, the Kremlin said in a statement following a lengthy phone call between the two leaders. But he stopped short of accepting a broader U.S.-backed 30-day ceasefire proposal that Ukraine has said it is ready to implement.

The Russian president raised concerns about such a truce being used by Ukraine to mobilize more soldiers and rearm itself, the Kremlin said. Putin also emphasized that any resolution of the conflict would require an end to all military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine, it said.

In a statement, the White House said negotiations on a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, as well as a more complete ceasefire and a permanent peace deal, would commence immediately in the Middle East. The statement did not say whether Ukraine would be invited.

It was not clear whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy would agree to halt his military’s strikes on Russian energy targets. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, Ukraine has tried to fight back against its much larger neighbor with drone and missile strikes deep in Russian territory, including on energy facilities. Those attacks, which Moscow says amount to terrorism, have allowed Kyiv to keep pressure on Russia’s economy.

Trump has urged Putin to agree to a 30-day ceasefire that he hopes would move one step closer to ending Europe’s biggest conflict since World War Two. The war has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of people, displaced millions and reduced entire towns to rubble.

Trump has hinted that a permanent peace deal could include territorial concessions by Kyiv and control of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

The talks between the two leaders came as Israel resumed its attacks on Hamas in Gaza, threatening a fragile truce partially brokered by a Trump envoy earlier this year and underscoring the difficulty of securing lasting ceasefires in long-running conflicts.

The U.S. president’s overtures to Putin since returning to the White House in January have left traditional U.S. allies wary.

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Ukraine and its Western allies have long described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an imperialist land grab, and Zelenskiy has accused Putin of deliberately prolonging the war.

Zelenskiy, who arrived in Finland on Tuesday to discuss the NATO state’s support for Ukraine, says Ukraine’s sovereignty is not negotiable and Russia must surrender the territory it has seized. He says Moscow’s ambitions will not stop at Ukraine if it is allowed to keep the territory it has seized.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned on Tuesday that Russia had massively expanded its military-industrial production capacity in preparation for “future confrontation with European democracies.”

Speaking to Trump late on Monday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer “reiterated that all must work together to put Ukraine in the strongest possible position to secure a just and lasting peace,” the British leader’s spokesperson said.

Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and most of four eastern Ukrainian regions following its invasion in February 2022. All told, it controls about a fifth of Ukrainian territory.

Putin said he sent troops into Ukraine because NATO’s creeping expansion threatened Russia’s security. He has demanded Ukraine drop any ambition of joining the Western military alliance.

Putin has also said Russia must keep control of Ukrainian territory it has seized, Western sanctions should be eased and Kyiv must stage a presidential election. Zelenskiy, elected in 2019, has remained in office under martial law he imposed because of the war.

(Additional reporting by Nandita Bose; Editing by Michael Perry, Timothy Heritage, Jonathan Boyle and Rod Nickel)