US President, Donald Trump said he believes Russia wants to end its war with Ukraine, but that Moscow could be “dragging their feet” after the Kremlin disputed accounts of agreements made with the US.
His comments came only hours after Russia said it would only implement a US-brokered deal to stop using force in the Black Sea once some of the sanctions imposed on its banks and exports over its invasion of Ukraine are lifted.
Following days of separate negotiations with Ukrainian and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia, the White House said on Tuesday that the two sides had agreed “to ensure safe navigation, eliminate the use of force, and prevent the use of commercial vessels for military purposes in the Black Sea.”
But while Zelensky confirmed in a news conference that Ukraine had agreed to stop using military force in the Black Sea, the Kremlin released its own statement on the talks, which included far-reaching conditions for signing up to the partial truce.
Those included lifting sanctions on its agricultural bank and other financial institutions and companies involved in exporting food and their re-connection to the SWIFT international payments system.
The US statements made no mention of the sanctions being lifted as a precondition to the ceasefire.
“I think Russia would like to see it end and I think (Ukraine’s President Volodymyr) Zelensky would like to see it end, at this point,” Trump said.
Talking about Russia’s conditions, Trump said his administration was looking at them.
“We’re thinking about all of them right now. There are five or six conditions. We are looking at all of them,” he said.
The White House said that Russia and Ukraine also agreed to implement a previously announced pause on attacks against energy infrastructure.
But details of that agreement have also remained opaque. The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday said that Russia stopped targeting energy infrastructure from March 18, when Trump and Putin held a phone call in which they discussed the proposal.
However, Ukraine has accused Moscow of continuing to attack its infrastructure in the past week, with an aide to Zelensky saying there had been at least eight strikes.
At the same time, Russia accused Kyiv of attacking its own facilities, including an oil pumping station in the southern Russian region of Krasnodar.
