US hopes for Ukraine peace deal by April 20 as Putin seems in no hurry

By Bloomberg News

The US is still hoping a broad ceasefire in Russia’s war in Ukraine can be reached within weeks, even as the warring sides continue attacks and signs ahead of talks scheduled for the coming days that the Kremlin is in no hurry to reach a deal.

The White House aims for a truce agreement by April 20, which this year is Easter in both the Western and Orthodox churches, but recognizes that timeline may slip given the large gaps between the positions of the two sides, according to people familiar with the planning. They asked not to be identified to discuss matters that aren’t public.

Trump pledged to deliver a quick resolution to the three-year-old war since before he took office, but progress has been limited. US officials will meet separately with Russian and Ukrainian representatives in Saudi Arabia in the coming days for the first such parallel negotiations since the early weeks of Russia’s invasion.

“I believe we’re going to pretty soon have a full ceasefire,” President Donald Trump told reporters on Friday when asked about attacks continuing despite an agreement to limit strikes on energy infrastructure he announced after a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday.

On Saturday, Trump said efforts to stop the war from escalating further were “under control” and touted his “good” relationships with the leaders of both Russia and Ukraine.

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 continues waves of drone attacks on Ukrainian cities, killing civilians, including at least three in a strike on the capital early Sunday morning. Ukraine has also kept up air assaults on Russia, including strikes on a military airbase and a command center.

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.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr 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.

“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.

“We have made more progress in this Russia-Ukraine conflict in the last eight weeks than anyone thought we would ever make,” Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, said in an interview with Tucker Carlson posted late Friday. “The ultimate goal is a 30-day ceasefire during which we discuss a permanent ceasefire. We’re not far away from that.”

Witkoff noted that while NATO membership for Ukraine isn’t on the agenda, an alternative where the country would be protected by the alliance’s Article 5 security guarantee “is open for discussion.” He didn’t elaborate.

Trump has pushed for economic deals with Ukraine that he says will give the US a material interest in the country’s post-war security. But the White House sent mixed signals last week over the fate of a resources deal Trump had sought. In his call with Zelenskiy on Wednesday, the White House said he also raised the possibility of the US taking control of Ukrainian nuclear power plants. Ukraine’s leader disputed that account and rejected the idea of giving the US ownership of the country’s largest atomic facility.

European officials are skeptical Trump would raise pressure on Moscow if it resists a deal. But their efforts to come up with peacekeeping forces to secure any ceasefire deal have struggled given limited military capabilities and concerns about triggering Russian retaliation.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has shifted to a focus on air and sea support as the prospect of coming up with enough ground troops has faded. European officials meet in Paris this week for more talks on the plans. Russia has also fiercely opposed any European deployment in Ukraine as part of a deal.

“The Russians here are playing a game of trying to get as much as they can while understanding this is probably their best opportunity in a long time to negotiate something real, so they don’t want to completely torpedo that,” said Emma Ashford, senior fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington.

“What we’re more likely to see is this partial ceasefire deal that leads to another small deal, that leads to something else,” she added.