MOSCOW/LONDON--Russian President Vladimir Putin's suggestion of a ceasefire in Ukraine to freeze the war was rejected by the United States after contacts between intermediaries, three Russian sources with knowledge of the discussions told Reuters.
The failure of Putin's approach ushers in a third year of the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two and illustrates just how far apart the world's two largest nuclear powers remain. A U.S. source denied there had been any official contact and said Washington would not engage in talks that did not involve Ukraine. Putin sent signals to Washington in 2023 in public and privately through intermediaries, including through Moscow's Arab partners in the Middle East and others, that he was ready to consider a ceasefire in Ukraine, the Russian sources said. Putin was proposing to freeze the conflict at the current lines and was unwilling to cede any of the Ukrainian territory controlled by Russia, but the signal offered what some in the Kremlin saw as the best path towards a peace of some kind. "The contacts with the Americans came to nothing," a senior Russian source with knowledge of the discussions in late 2023 and early 2024 told Reuters on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation. A second Russian source with knowledge of the contacts told Reuters that the Americans told Moscow, via the intermediaries, they would not discuss a possible ceasefire without the participation of Ukraine and so the contacts ended in failure. A third source with knowledge of the discussions said: "Everything fell apart with the Americans." The source said that the Americans did not want to pressure Ukraine. The extent of the contacts - and their failure - has not previously been reported. It comes as U.S. President Joe Biden has for months been pushing Congress to approve more aid for Ukraine, but has faced opposition from allies of Republican presidential nomination frontrunner Donald Trump. The Kremlin, the White House, the U.S. State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) all declined to comment. Putin sent thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022, triggering a full-scale war after eight years of conflict in eastern Ukraine between Ukrainian forces on the one side and pro-Russian Ukrainians and Russian proxies on the other. Ukraine says it is fighting for its existence and the West casts Putin's invasion as an imperial-style land grab that challenges the post-Cold War international order. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says he will never accept Russia's control over Ukrainian land. He has outlawed any contacts with Russia. A U.S. official, speaking in Washington on condition of anonymity, said that the U.S. has not engaged in any back channel discussions with Russia and that Washington had been consistent in not going behind the back of Ukraine. The U.S. official said that there appeared to have been unofficial "Track II" conversations among Russians not in the government but that the United States was not engaged in them.
