Ukraine and the USA/Russia peace talks

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Russia and Ukraine blamed each other on Sunday for breaking a one-day Easter ceasefire declared by President Vladimir Putin, with each side accusing the other of hundreds of attacks and the Kremlin saying there was no order for a ceasefire extension.

Putin, who sent thousands of Russian troops into Ukraine in February 2022, ordered his forces to stop all military activity along the front line in the three-year-old war until midnight Moscow time on Sunday.

TASS news agency quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying there was no order from Putin to extend the ceasefire.

In Washington, the State Department said it would welcome an extension.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, said Moscow’s actions in coming days “will reveal Russia’s true attitude toward U.S. peace efforts” and a proposed 30-day ceasefire.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia was pretending to observe the Easter ceasefire, but had carried out hundreds of artillery attacks on Saturday night, and more on Sunday.

Russia launched 67 assaults from midnight until 8 p.m. local time, Zelenskyy wrote on X.

“Either Putin does not have full control over his army, or the situation proves that in Russia, they have no intention of making a genuine move toward ending the war, and are only interested in favorable PR coverage,” Zelenskyy posted.

However, there were no air raid alerts today. Hence, this is a format of ceasefire that has been achieved and that is the easiest to extend,” he said, proposing that Russia abandon drone and missile strikes on civilian targets for at least 30 days.

If Russia does not agree, it will be proof that it intends to continue doing only those things that destroy human lives and prolong the war, Zelenskyy added.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said Ukraine had broken the ceasefire more than 1,000 times, damaging infrastructure and causing civilian deaths.

The apparent failure to observe even an Easter ceasefire shows how hard it will be for U.S. President Donald Trump to clinch a lasting peace deal. The president still struck an optimistic note Sunday, saying that “hopefully” the two sides would make a deal “this week” to end the conflict.

President Donald Trump slammed Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, accusing him of derailing negotiations to end the war in Ukraine while a peace deal was “very close.”

In a long post on Truth Social, Trump described Zelenskyy’s rejection of Russia's takeover of Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, as “very harmful” to achieving peace.

“It’s inflammatory statements like Zelenskyy’s that makes it so difficult to settle this War,” Trump wrote.

Zelenskyy has consistently rejected the suggestion that his country give up its claim to the Crimean Peninsula.

“There’s nothing to talk about here,” he said at a media conference Tuesday. “This is against our constitution.”

The latest setback comes during a week in which the Trump administration has doubled down on efforts to push Kyiv and Moscow toward a truce. Next week marks 100 days of Trump's second presidential term, and he promised to end the war on his first day back in office. Rubio suggested last week that the United States may walk away from ceasefire efforts, failing any further progress.

Vance said earlier in the day that he was “optimistic” about the talks but also doubled down on the threat to walk away from negotiations.

“I think that we put together a very fair proposal,” he told reporters on his trip in India. “We’re going to see if the Europeans, the Russians and the Ukrainians are ultimately able to get this thing over the finish line.”

Earlier, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that the U.S. has not set a deadline for a ceasefire and that "Russia does not consider it appropriate to set deadlines either," Russian news agency Tass reported.

"The downgrading is significant," said Bence Németh, a senior lecturer in the defense studies department at King’s College London, citing Zelenskyy's rejection of Russia's maintaining control of Crimea as part of any deal.

Rubio and Witkoff's absence "suggests that Washington is increasingly disinterested in drawn-out, multilateral negotiations," Németh added. "This is not just about diplomacy fatigue. It also signals a hard pivot: The U.S. is not positioning itself as a neutral mediator."

State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce confirmed Tuesday that Rubio would skip the meeting hours after saying the opposite. “That is not a statement regarding the meetings. It’s a statement about logistical issues in his schedule,” he said.

Despite initial plans to attend the scheduled talks, neither Rubio nor Witkoff were in London on Wednesday, a European diplomat told NBC News.

President Donald Trump spoke with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other leaders in separate calls Monday, in an attempt to stop the “bloodbath” of the war in Ukraine.

But the president’s outreach was inconclusive, and there was little sign of a breakthrough. Russia and Ukraine would hold direct talks on a ceasefire “immediately,” Trump said afterward in a post on his social network Truth Social, but it was unclear what form those talks would take or when they would happen. The Vatican, Trump said, has expressed interest in hosting the negotiations.

“The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of,” he said.

Trump’s call with Putin lasted more than two hours and “was very informative and very open,” Putin told Russian state media.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office Monday afternoon, Trump said he had asked Putin to meet with him, but did not say whether Putin had agreed.

Trump said little about his conversation with Zelenskyy, with whom he spoke first, other than to say that he had informed Zelenskyy and the leaders of other NATO countries of the negotiations. White House officials declined to offer any further details.

Trump spoke with Zelenskyy twice on Monday, according to Zelenskyy, once one-on-one, before Trump’s call with Putin, and again during a conference call with the Ukrainian and NATO leaders.

“I reaffirmed to President Trump that Ukraine is ready for a full and unconditional ceasefire,” Zelenskyy tweeted. “If the Russians are not ready to stop the killings, there must be stronger sanctions,” he wrote. “Pressure on Russia will push it toward real peace — this is obvious to everyone around the world.”

In a Monday interview with NBC News in Rome, where he was received by Pope Leo XIV, Vice President JD Vance said, “We talked about a couple of what I would call the president’s major peace initiatives with the pope. We talked a lot about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza. We talked a lot about the Russia-Ukraine situation. It’s hard to predict the future, but I do think that, not just the pope, but the entire Vatican, has expressed a desire to be, you know, really helpful, and to work together on facilitating, hopefully, a peace deal coming together. Can’t predict the future, but that was very meaningful, and I think will hopefully bear fruit for the country.”

Meanwhile, Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said before the call that Russia “highly values” and is “grateful to the American side.” In a briefing with journalists, he said that if the U.S. can “help to achieve our goals through peaceful means, then this is indeed preferable.”

Peskov was also asked about the chance of Trump and Putin meeting in person, a possibility the American president floated on Friday.

“It will largely depend on what they themselves decide,” Peskov said. The meeting “needs to be worked out” by the two leaders in terms of dates and other details, he added.

Ahead of the much anticipated Trump-Putin call, leaders from Britain, France, Germany and Italy said they spoke Sunday with Trump. The British government said in a statement that it was urging “Putin to take peace talks seriously.”

Those leaders “also discussed the use of sanctions if Russia failed to engage seriously in a ceasefire and peace talks,” the statement said — something Trump has previously threatened.

“Tomorrow, President Putin must show he wants peace by accepting the 30-day unconditional ceasefire proposed by President Trump and backed by Ukraine and Europe,” French President Emmanuel Macron said on X.

Trump has been widely criticized for appearing to offer concessions to Russia while demanding sacrifices from Ukraine. Those voices were joined last week by former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink, who gave details of why she stepped down last month.

“The policy since the beginning of the Trump administration has been to put pressure on the victim, Ukraine, rather than on the aggressor, Russia,” she wrote in an opinion piece Friday for the Detroit Free Press.

“Peace at any price is not peace at all ― it is appeasement,” she said, adding that “we must show leadership in the face of aggression, not weakness or complicity.”

While the diplomatic activity carries on, the violence in Ukraine continues. Russia has continued its near-nightly drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian civilians, more than three years after it launched a full-scale invasion and tried to seize Kyiv.

On Sunday, Russia shelled residential neighborhoods of the eastern Ukrainian city of Kherson, killing a 75-year-old woman and injuring two other people, the city council posted on the Telegram messaging site.

As well as being widely blamed for launching an unprovoked war, Russia is condemned across the West for the highly repressive and authoritarian state fashioned by Putin's Kremlin.

On Monday, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office labeled one of those critics, Amnesty International, as an "undesirable organization" and effectively banned it. The authority accused the London-based human rights watchdog of being "Russophobic," trying to prolong the war, wanting to "justify the crimes of Ukrainian neo-Nazis" and its staffers of supporting "extremist organizations."

Trump, who has often spoken warmly of Putin, rarely if ever mentions these human rights concerns.