President Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Voldymi Zelensky on Wednesday to discuss the next steps after a discussion of the US leadership with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.
According to a social media post by Trump's senior White House aide Dancekabino, the phone started at 10am and was still ongoing an hour later.
Zelensky said he hopes Trump will explain to him about the US president's conversation a day before he was with Putin. That proposal to halt attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure had not reached a 30-day unconditional ceasefire in which Kiev agreed to Washington's urges.
On Wednesday, Zelensky said he seemed open to the latest offers for a limited ceasefire, but that he thought that in such a ceasefire we needed to monitor our work.
“The only arguments he wouldn't attack energy sites and Putin's words are too few,” Zelensky said. “War has made us practical people.”
Ukraine prepares a list of sites that need to be protected. And surveillance said “Russia will not hit our objects, we will not hit theirs,” he told a press conference in Helsinki along with Finland's president Alexander Stubb.
Emphasizing the lack of trust between Ukraine and Russia, the two countries on Wednesday accused of attacks on each other's energy infrastructure.
Zelensky has characterized some of the conditions Putin has set for a wider ceasefire, including a request for a complete halt of foreign military and intelligence reporting aid to Ukraine, as an attempt to halt for time, allowing Russia to improve its position of the troops on the battlefield and its negotiation hands.
The Ukrainian president repeated the point after the call between Putin and Trump, saying that setting conditions made it clear that Russia did not want to end the war.
Although Ukraine's European allies have been cautiously welcoming the move to a ceasefire, they pledged further support for Kiev, reflecting concerns about the situation in Russia.
Finland's president, Stabb, told a news conference. “Ukraine has accepted a ceasefire without any form of condition. If Russia refuses to agree, it will need to increase its efforts to strengthen Ukraine and strengthen pressure on Russia.”
The 30-day ceasefire proposal, which Ukraine agreed after consultations with US Saudi Arabian officials, was even broader. It would have been applied to land, sky and seas, which was the first halt of hostilities since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine over three years ago. Zelensky said the long ceasefire that month was intended to give time for more fulfilling negotiations on long-term peace.
On Wednesday, he repeated that Ukraine would have a “red line” in such talks.
“For us, the red line is the recognition of the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine as Russian,” he said. “We don't agree with that.”
Anastasia Kuznietsova and Johanna Remora Reports of contributions.
