Russian President Vladimir Putin is unlikely to accept the US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine, Russian sources told "Reuters", News.bg reports.
According to them, any agreement would have to reflect Russia's progress on the battlefield and address Moscow's concerns.
Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries, displaced millions of people, and sparked the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
US President Donald Trump reversed previous US policy toward Russia, opening bilateral talks with Moscow and suspending military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine. Trump said Ukraine must agree to terms for an end to the war.
On Tuesday, the United States agreed to resume military aid and intelligence sharing after Kiev said it was ready to support a ceasefire proposal.
A senior Russian source told Reuters that Russia would first have to negotiate the terms of any ceasefire and receive guarantees before agreeing to anything.
“It’s hard for Putin to agree to this in its current form,” the source said. “Putin has a strong position because Russia is making progress.”
Russia controls just under a fifth of Ukraine, about 113,000 square kilometers, and has been making progress for months. Ukraine seized part of western Russia in August as a bargaining chip, but its grip there is weakening, according to open-source maps of the war and Russian assessments.
The Russian source noted that without guarantees along with the ceasefire, Russia's position could weaken and it could be accused by the West of failing to end the war.
Another senior Russian source explained that the ceasefire proposal looked like a trap for Moscow, as Putin would find it difficult to stop the war without concrete guarantees or promises.
A third Russian source stressed that the bigger picture was that the United States had agreed to resume military aid and intelligence sharing and presented that as a ceasefire proposal.
The Kremlin has yet to make an official statement.
Putin has repeatedly dismissed the possibility of a short-term end to the the fire.
"We do not need a truce, we need a long-term peace, secured with guarantees for the Russian Federation and its citizens. The difficult question is how to provide these guarantees," he said in December.
On January 20, he told the Security Council that "there should be no short-term truce, no kind of respite for regrouping forces and rearming with a view to continuing the conflict, but a long-term peace."
In June last year, Putin laid out his terms for peace: Ukraine must formally abandon its NATO ambitions and withdraw its troops from the entire territory of four Ukrainian regions claimed and now largely controlled by Russia.
Russia controls 75 percent of Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions and more than 99 percent of Luhansk region, according to Russian estimates.
Russia claims that all four regions are now legally part of Russia and will never be returned to Ukraine, which it says was illegally annexed and will never recognize. Russian sovereignty over them.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in an interview given on March 11 and published on March 12, said that Russia would not accept NATO troops "under any flag, in any capacity on Ukrainian soil."
Russian state channel Rossiya 24 reported that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's remarks about Ukraine's readiness to negotiate seemed "quite naive," given the history of relations between Kiev and Moscow. A senior Russian lawmaker has previously said that any peace will be on Moscow's terms.
"Russia is making progress in Ukraine, and therefore it will be different with Russia," said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the international affairs committee of the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament, in a post on Telegram.
"Any agreements - with full understanding of the need for compromise - on our terms, not on American ones. And this is not bragging, but an understanding that real agreements are still being written there, on the front. Which they should understand in Washington as well."