MOSCOW, Mar 14: President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia supported a US proposal for a ceasefire in Ukraine in principle, but that any truce would have to address the root causes of the conflict and that many crucial details needed to be sorted out.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 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 heavily caveated support for the US ceasefire proposal looked designed to signal goodwill to Washington and to open the door to further talks with US President Donald Trump. But the sheer number of clarifications Putin sought and the conditions he suggested might need to be attached to reassure Moscow appeared to rule out a swift ceasefire.
"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."
He went on to list a slew of issues he said needed clarifying and 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, who said he was willing to talk to the Russian leader by phone, called Putin's statement "very promising" and said he hoped Moscow would "do the right thing."
Trump said Steve Witkoff, his special envoy, was engaged in serious talks with the Russians in Moscow around the US proposal which Kyiv has already agreed to.
Ukraine is likely to see Putin's stance as an attempt to buy time while Russian troops squeeze the last Ukrainian troops out of western Russia and Moscow sticks to demands that Kyiv regards as seeking its own capitulation.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin said Putin conveyed "additional" signals to Trump via Witkoff, and that the two leaders could speak once Trump had been briefed on these messages.
"When Mr Witkoff brings all the information to President Trump, we will determine the timing of a conversation," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
"There is an understanding on all sides that such a conversation is needed." �"REUTERS, AFP
