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Freezing Russia’s war along the current frontlines is “a good compromise,” Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Wednesday, reiterating his support for the idea of a ceasefire as the first step towards any deal to put an end to Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
“I think that was a good compromise but I’m not sure that (Vladimir) Putin will support it,” Zelenskyy said during a visit to Norway, adding that he communicated this to US President Donald Trump.
“It’s not like a plan (for) how to totally stop the war, it’s mostly a plan of ceasefire.”
Kyiv has been suggesting this approach since the very first talks with Trump: Immediate unconditional ceasefire in Ukraine, followed by the direct Zelenskyy-Putin talks.
The US president supported this idea at first before suggesting that Kyiv and Moscow should go straight to the peace deal talks, skipping the ceasefire step.
Trump’s stance seems to have changed recently and earlier this week he said that freezing the war along the current frontlines is a necessary step.
“They can negotiate something later on down the line. But I said cut and stop at the battle line” Trump said shortly before a planned summit with Putin in Hungary was put on hold.
Moscow has rejected the idea of the ceasefire all along, insisting that the war will continue until the Kremlin reached its stated goals, which Moscow calls “root causes,” the argument it has repeatedly used to justify its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
According to Moscow, those “root causes” include Ukraine’s aspirations to join both the EU and NATO as well as NATO’s alleged violation of commitments not to expand eastwards, the Ukrainian government’s alleged discrimination against ethnic Russians and what Putin calls the “denazification” of Ukraine.
No ceasefire – no meeting
Moscow’s refusal to cease fighting at the current contact lines is a sticking point for the Trump-Putin meeting, initially expected to take place in Budapest in either late October or early November.
Even the meeting between the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has been postponed indefinitely after the phone call.
On Tuesday, commenting on why his meeting with Putin was put on hold, Trump said he did not want a “wasted meeting.”
Trump and Putin last met in Alaska in August, during a hastily organised summit which yielded no concrete results. But the US president said that Putin assured him that he wants to reach a peace agreement to put an end to his war against Ukraine.
Since then, Trump has been trying to organise direct Moscow-Kyiv talks, but the Kremlin rejected the idea.
EU support for the ceasefire plan
In the run up to the EU summit in Brussels on Thursday, European leaders and Zelenskyy issued a joint statement calling for a ceasefire along the current front lines in Ukraine.
“We remain committed to the principle that international borders must not be changed by force,” it said,
From Brussels, Zelenskyy will travel to London on Friday for a meeting of the “coalition of the willing” in a renewed push by Kyiv to get together Ukraine’s western partners and jointly win Trump over with their vision and possibly a plan on pressuring Moscow to a ceasefire.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said on Wednesday he has “total confidence in President Trump” and “his leadership to an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine.”
“He is the only one who can get this done” with “the clear vision on bringing this war to a durable and lasting end,” Rutte said in Washington.
“The president was very clear this weekend, saying stop where you are, which sounds simple but also is exactly right.”