US President Donald Trump said on Saturday he would speak to the presidents of Russia and Ukraine on Monday following talks between the two sides at which a Ukrainian official said Moscow\u2019s negotiators voiced new demands before a ceasefire could be agreed.<\/p>\n
In Moscow, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told Russian news agencies preparations were underway for a conversation between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump.<\/p>\n
The talks in Turkiye on Friday were the first time the sides had held face-to-face talks since March 2022, weeks after Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of its smaller neighbour.<\/p>\n
A senior Ukrainian official familiar with the talks said Russian negotiators demanded Ukraine pull its troops out of all Ukrainian regions claimed by Moscow before they would agree to a ceasefire.<\/p>\n
Trump, writing on Truth Social, said he would speak with Putin to discuss stopping the war at 10am on Monday.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe subjects of the call will be, stopping the \u2018bloodbath\u2019 that is killing, on average, more than 5000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers a week, and trade,\u201d Trump wrote in capital letters.<\/p>\n
He said he would speak afterwards with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and various members of Nato.<\/p>\n
\u201cHopefully, it will be a productive day, a ceasefire will take place, and this very violent war, a war that should have never happened, will end.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump had offered to travel to Turkiye for the talks while in the Gulf last week if Putin would also attend, but Putin sent a team of negotiators instead.<\/p>\n
The president has been pressuring Putin and Zelenskiy to agree to a ceasefire in the more than three-year-old war.<\/p>\n
The Kremlin declined to comment on the terms that Russia had put forward at Friday\u2019s meeting.<\/p>\n
The talks lasted only one hour and 40 minutes and yielded an agreement to trade 1,000 prisoners of war on each side.<\/p>\n
The two countries have not specified when that would happen.<\/p>\n
Zelenskiy called on Saturday for stronger sanctions on Moscow after a Russian drone killed nine bus passengers in the Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was a deliberate killing of civilians,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cPressure must be exerted on Russia to stop the killings. Without tougher sanctions, without stronger pressure, Russia will not seek real diplomacy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Russia, which denies targeting civilians, said it struck a military target in Sumy. Its defence ministry said Russian troops had captured another settlement in eastern Ukraine.<\/p>\n
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke by telephone with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and said he welcomed the \u201cpositive role\u201d of the United States in helping to secure a resumption of talks between Russia and Ukraine.<\/p>\n
A Russian foreign ministry statement quoted Lavrov as saying contacts would continue.<\/p>\n
The US State Department said that during the conversation, Rubio welcomed the prisoner exchange agreement and emphasised Trump\u2019s call for an immediate ceasefire.<\/p>\n
Pressing for immediate ceasefire
\nUkraine and Western governments, including the US, have demanded that Russia agree to an immediate, unconditional ceasefire lasting at least 30 days.<\/p>\n
But the Ukrainian source said Moscow\u2019s negotiators had demanded the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, with a ceasefire to take place only after that.<\/p>\n
The source said that and other demands went beyond the terms of a draft peace deal that the United States proposed last month after consultations with Moscow.<\/p>\n
Peskov declined to comment on the Ukrainian account, saying talks should be conducted \u201cabsolutely behind closed doors\u201d.<\/p>\n
He said the next steps would be to carry out the prisoner exchange and conduct further work between the two sides.<\/p>\n
Peskov said it was possible that Putin could meet Zelenskiy, but only if \u201ccertain agreements\u201d were reached, which he did not specify.<\/p>\n
Zelenskiy had challenged Putin earlier in the week to meet him in person, an offer the Russian leader ignored.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US President Donald Trump said on Saturday he would speak to the presidents of Russia and Ukraine on Monday following talks between the two sides at which a Ukrainian official said Moscow\u2019s negotiators voiced new demands before a ceasefire could be agreed. In Moscow, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told Russian news agencies preparations were underway […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9235,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9234"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9236,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9234\/revisions\/9236"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}