UNITED States President Donald Trump has announced plans to discuss ending the war in Ukraine with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, March 18.
“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One during a late flight back to Washington from Florida.
“Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance. I’ll be speaking to President Putin on Tuesday. A lot of work’s been done over the weekend,” he added.
The ICIR reported on March 14, that Putin expressed support for the US proposal for a ceasefire in Ukraine but emphasised that fighting could not stop until several key conditions were met.
Putin’s support for the planned ceasefire came after Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, held talks on Thursday, March 13, with Russians in Moscow on the US 30-day ceasefire proposal, which Kyiv agreed to last week.
Even though the Kremlin said on Friday that Putin had sent a message to Trump regarding his ceasefire plan to end the three-year conflict, in separate appearances on Sunday TV shows in the US, Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, stressed that there were significant challenges to confront before Russia would agree to a ceasefire.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Friday that he saw a good chance to end the conflict after Kyiv accepted the US proposal for a 30-day interim ceasefire.
However, Zelenskiy has consistently said that the sovereignty of his country is not negotiable and that Russia must surrender the territory it has seized from Ukraine.
The ICIR reported that Russia seized the Crimea peninsula in 2014 and now controls most of four eastern Ukrainian regions since it invaded the country in 2022.
Nanji is an investigative journalist with the ICIR. She has years of experience in reporting and broadcasting human angle stories, gender inequalities, minority stories, and human rights issues.