Russian President Vladimir Putin. (AP) The Kremlin said on Wednesday that President Vladimir Putin has accepted parts of a new set of US proposals to end the war in Ukraine, while rejecting others, but remains open to continued negotiations with Washington for as long as needed.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made the remarks a day after Putin held lengthy talks in Moscow with US President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The meeting stretched into the early hours of Wednesday, with Putin’s foreign policy aide later acknowledging that “compromises have not yet been found.”
Peskov rejected suggestions that Putin had dismissed the US plan entirely. “A direct exchange of views took place yesterday for the first time. Some things were accepted, some things were marked as unacceptable. This is a normal working process of finding a compromise,” he said.
He added that Russia appreciated Trump’s efforts to push the talks forward but said the Kremlin would not provide running commentary, arguing that public negotiations were unlikely to help. Discussions, he said, were now continuing at an expert level to prepare the ground for future high-level contacts.
The diplomatic maneuvering comes after a leaked batch of 28 draft US peace proposals surfaced in November, drawing criticism from Kyiv and European capitals, who said they appeared to concede too much to Moscow. European powers later submitted a counter-proposal, and subsequent talks in Geneva resulted in what US and Ukrainian officials called an “updated and refined peace framework.”
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Putin on Tuesday accused European governments of attempting to derail the process by putting forward ideas “absolutely unacceptable to Russia.”
Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, said after the Witkoff meeting that Moscow had earlier received a 27-point proposal from the US, followed by four additional documents, all of which were discussed in the talks. Putin has previously said that Washington and Kyiv divided the initial proposals into four components, but neither side has disclosed the details.
(With inputs from Reuters)
