Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to sign a ceasefire deal, bringing an end to nearly three years of intense conflict with Ukraine, which has resulted in humanitarian and economic cost for both nations.
Putin, meanwhile, noted that the truce would have to comprehensively address the deep-seated and complex root causes of the war in order to ensure a lasting and sustainable peace.
The president, during a news conference in the Kremlin following talks with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, stated that these root causes are crucial details needed to be sorted out.
“We agree with the proposals to cease hostilities, the idea itself is correct, and we certainly support it.”
“But we proceed from the fact that this cessation should be such that it would lead to long-term peace and would eliminate the original causes of this crisis,” he said on Thursday.
He went on to list a slew of issues he said needed clarifying and thanked U.S president Donald Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, for his efforts to end the war which both Moscow and Washington now cast as a deadly proxy war which could have escalated into World War Three.
However, Putin noted that the ceasefire would have to ensure that Ukraine did not seek to simply use it to regroup adding that he might need to call the U.S president to discuss this issue.
“How can we and how will we be guaranteed that nothing like this will happen? How will control (of the ceasefire) be organiZed?” Putin said. “These are all serious questions.”
“There are issues that we need to discuss. And I think we need to talk to our American colleagues as well.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has left hundreds of thousands of dead and injured, displaced millions of people, reduced towns to rubble and triggered the sharpest confrontation between Moscow and the West in decades.
Russia over recent days has pressed a lightning offensive in the western region of Kursk against Ukrainian forces which smashed through the border last August in a bid to divert forces from eastern Ukraine, gain a bargaining chip and embarrass Putin.
According to the military, Ukraine now has a sliver of less than 200 square km (77 square miles) in Kursk, down from 1,300 square km (500 square miles) at the peak of the incursion last summer.
