KYIV: US arms deliveries to Ukraine resumed Wednesday, officials said, a day after the Trump administration lifted its suspension of military aid for Kyiv in its fight against Russia’s invasion, and officials awaited the Kremlin’s response to a proposed 30-day ceasefire endorsed by Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said it’s important not to “get ahead” of the question of responding to the ceasefire, which was proposed by Washington. He told reporters that Moscow is awaiting “detailed information” from the US and suggested that Russia must get that before it can take a position. The Kremlin has previously opposed anything short of a permanent end to the conflict and has not accepted any concessions.
US President Donald Trump wants to end the three-year war and pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to enter talks. The suspension of US assistance happened days after Zelensky and Trump argued about the conflict in a tense White House meeting. The administration’s decision to resume military aid after talks Tuesday with senior Ukrainian officials in Saudi Arabia marked a sharp shift in its stance.
Trump said “it’s up to Russia now” as his administration presses Moscow to agree to the ceasefire.
“And hopefully we can get a ceasefire from Russia,” Trump said Wednesday in an extended exchange with reporters during an Oval Office meeting with Micheál Martin, the prime minster of Ireland. “And if we do, I think that would be 80 percent of the way to getting this horrible bloodbath” ended.
The US president again made veiled threats of hitting Russia with new sanctions.
“We can, but I hope it’s not going to be necessary,” Trump said.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who led the American delegation to Saudi Arabia, where Ukraine consented to the US ceasefire proposal, said Washington will pursue “multiple points of contacts” with Russia to see if President Vladimir Putin is ready to negotiate an end to the war. He declined to give details or say what steps might be taken if Putin refuses to engage.
The US hopes to see Russia stop attacks on Ukraine within the next few days as a first step, Rubio said at a refueling stop Wednesday in Shannon, Ireland, on his way to talks in Canada with other Group of Seven leading industrialized nations.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News that national security adviser Mike Waltz spoke Wednesday with his Russian counterpart.
She also confirmed that Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, will head to Moscow for talks with Russian officials. She did not say with whom Witkoff planned to meet. A person familiar with the matter said Witkoff is expected to meet with Putin later his week. The person was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Ukraine says ceasefire would allow time for planning end to war
Zelensky said the 30-day ceasefire would allow the sides “to fully prepare a step-by-step plan for ending the war, including security guarantees for Ukraine.”
Technical questions over how to effectively monitor a truce along the roughly 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line, where small but deadly drones are common, are “very important,” Zelensky told reporters Wednesday in Kyiv.
Arms deliveries to Ukraine have already resumed through a Polish logistics center, the foreign ministers of Ukraine and Poland announced Wednesday. The deliveries go through a NATO and US hub in the eastern Polish city of Rzeszow that’s has been used to ferry Western weapons into neighboring Ukraine about 70 kilometers (45 miles) away.
The American military help is vital for Ukraine’s shorthanded and weary army, which is having a tough time keeping Russia’s bigger military force at bay. For Russia, the American aid spells potentially more difficulty in achieving war aims, and it could make Washington’s peace efforts a tougher sell in Moscow.
The US government has also restored Ukraine’s access to unclassified commercial satellite pictures provided by Maxar Technologies through a program Washington runs, Maxar spokesperson Tomi Maxted told The Associated Press. The images help Ukraine plan attacks, assess their success and monitor Russian movements.
In other developments, officials acknowledged Wednesday that Kyiv no longer has any of the longer-range Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, missiles.
According to a US official and a Ukrainian lawmaker on the country’s defense committee, Ukraine has run out of the ATACMs. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to provide military weapons details.
The US official said the US provided fewer than 40 of those missiles overall and that Ukraine ran out of them in late January. Senior US defense leaders, including the previous Pentagon chief, Lloyd Austin, had made it clear that only a limited number of the ATACMs would be delivered and that the US and NATO allies considered other weapons to be more valuable in the fight.
Russian officials are wary about the US-Ukraine talks
Russian lawmakers signaled wariness about the prospect of a ceasefire.
“Russia is advancing (on the battlefield), so it will be different with Russia,” senior Russian senator Konstantin Kosachev noted in a post on the messaging app Telegram.
“Any agreements (with the understanding of the need for compromise) should be on our terms, not American,” Kosachev wrote.
Lawmaker Mikhail Sheremet told the state news agency Tass that Russia “is not interested in continuing” the war, but at the same time Moscow “will not tolerate being strung along.”
The outcome of the Saudi Arabia talks “places the onus on Washington to persuade Moscow to accept and implement the ceasefire,” said John Hardie, a defense analyst and deputy director of the Russia program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based research institute.
“Moscow will present itself as cooperative, but may push for agreement on basic principles for a final peace deal before agreeing to a ceasefire,” he said.
“Russia may also insist on barring Western military aid to Ukraine during the ceasefire and on Ukraine holding elections ahead of a long-term peace agreement.”
Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, reported Wednesday that the service’s chief, Sergei Naryshkin, spoke on the phone Tuesday with CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
The two discussed cooperation “in areas of common interest and the resolution of crisis situations,” according to a statement by the SVR.
