The president of the United States, Donald Trump, said on Saturday that he would talk to the presidents of Russia and Ukraine on Monday after the conversations between the two parties where a Ukrainian official said that Moscow negotiators expressed new demands before a fire could be agreed.
In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian news agencies that the preparations were underway for a conversation between Russian president Vladimir Putin and Trump.
The conversations in Turkiye on Friday were the first time the parties had had face to face since March 2022, weeks after the large -scale invasion of Russia of their smallest neighbor.
A senior Ukrainian official familiar with the conversations said that Russian negotiators demanded that Ukraine bring their troops from all Ukrainian regions claimed by Moscow before they accepted the fire.
Trump, writing about Truth Social, said he would talk to Putin to discuss war arrest at 10 am on Monday.
“The calls of the call will be, to stop the ‘blood bath’ that is killing, on average, more than 5000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers per week, and trade,” Trump wrote in capital letters.
He said he would speak with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and several NATO members.
“With luck, it will be a productive day, a high fire will be held, and this very violent war, a war that should never have happened, will end.”
Trump had offered to travel to Turkiye for the conversations while he was in the Gulf last week if Putin also attended, but Putin sent a team of negotiators.
The president has been pressing Putin and Zelenskiy to agree on fire in the war for more than three years.
The Kremlin declined to comment on the terms Russia had presented at Friday’s meeting.
The conversations lasted only an hour and 40 minutes and threw an agreement to change 1,000 prisoners of war on each side.
The two countries have not specified when that would happen.
Zelenskiy requested stronger sanctions against Moscow after a Russian drone killed nine bus passengers in the sumy region of the Northeast of Ukraine.
“This was a deliberate murder of civilians,” he said.
“Pressure should be exerted on Russia to stop the murders. Without harder sanctions, without stronger pressure, Russia will not seek real diplomacy.”
Russia, who denies attacking civilians, said he reached a military objective in Sumy. His Ministry of Defense said Russian troops had captured another settlement in eastern Ukraine.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on the phone with the United States Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and said he thanked the “positive role” of the United States to help ensure a resumption of conversations between Russia and Ukraine.
A statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia cited Lavrov saying that the contacts would continue.
The United States Department of State said that during the conversation, Rubio welcomed the prison exchange agreement and emphasized Trump’s call to a high immediate fire.
Pressing the immediate fire for the high
Ukraine and Western governments, including the United States, have demanded that Russia accept a high immediate and unconditional fire that lasts at least 30 days.
But the Ukrainian source said that Moscow negotiators had demanded the withdrawal of the Ukrainian troops of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, with a high fire only after that.
The source said that and other demands went beyond the terms of a peace -agreed draft that the United States proposed last month after consultations with Moscow.
Peskov declined to comment on the Ukrainian account, saying that conversations should be made “absolutely behind closed doors.”
He said that the next steps would be to carry out the exchange of prisoners and perform more work between the two parties.
Peskov said it was possible that Putin could meet Zelenskiy, but only if “certain agreements” were reached, which he did not specify.
Zelenskiy had challenged Putin at the beginning of the week to meet him in person, an offer that the Russian leader ignored.
Turkish president, Tayyip Erdogan, said his country, after organizing conversations, resolved to continue his mediation role.
Ukraine Rallies Support
After Friday’s meeting, Ukraine began to gather the support of his allies to take more difficult measures against Moscow.
“Once again, Russia is not serious,” said British Foreign Secretary David Lammy Reuters during a visit to Pakistan.
“When do we tell Putin, it’s enough?”
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, also said that the conversations in Istanbul had been unsuccessful.
“Today, what do we have? And then I tell you, face the cynicism of President Putin, I am sure that President Trump, aware of the credibility of the United States, will react.”
The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said that the EU was working on a new package of sanctions against Moscow, which France said that this week should aim to “quell” the Russian economy.
But after intensifying the sanctions for more than three years, it is not clear how much more they can achieve.
In their efforts to forge a united front and make Putin accept fire, Ukraine and its European leaders have been repeatedly discarded by Trump’s interventions.
Having told Zelenskiy to accept the offer of direct conversations of Russia in Turkiye, Trump said on the eve of the meeting that there could not be a peace movement until he met with Putin.
The Kremlin says that Putin is ready to meet Trump, but such a summit must be carefully prepared. He said there had been no contact between Russia and the United States from Friday’s conversations.
