US wants Ukraine ceasefire by Easter: Bloomberg

A US peace plan could be forthcoming within weeks or even days, Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy on Russia and Ukraine, said on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.

”The Trump administration has told European officials that it wants to secure a ceasefire in Ukraine by Easter,” Bloomberg said, citing sources briefed on the talks. According to the outlet, some European officials felt the pace of the negotiations was ambitious and possibly unrealistic. Talks are reportedly set to kick off with a meeting of Russian and US representatives in Saudi Arabia in the coming days.

Europe will not be given a place in the negotiations, Kellogg told top European diplomats on Saturday. Despite this, UK and EU officials fear the US expects them to shoulder the burden of Ukraine’s post-war security, Financial Times wrote on Thursday.

The envoy justified the exclusion of Europe, citing the legacy of the Minsk-2 agreement between Ukraine and now Russian Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in 2015. Germany and France stood as guarantors to the failed accord, which then German chancellor Angela Merkel later admitted was just meant to buy Kiev time to strengthen itself.

“When you looked at Minsk-2, there was a lot of people at the table that really had no ability to execute some type of peace process, and it failed miserably. So we are not gonna go down that path,” Kellogg stated.

Moscow has similarly underscored that it will not accept a temporary freeze of hostilities, like the Minsk accords, and insists on a permanent solution that addresses the fundamental causes of the conflict.

Just days prior, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump held a phone conversation in the first such interaction since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. The two leaders could meet in Saudi Arabia by the end of this month, Newsweek wrote on Sunday, citing reports.

Putin has previously stressed that Moscow has never shied away from peace talks, but emphasized that they have to be based on terms previously agreed in Istanbul in 2022, modified for the territorial “realities on the ground.”

Russia has demanded that Ukraine embrace neutrality, demilitarize, denazify and remain free of nuclear weapons, among other points.