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Moscow has intensified its efforts to push Ukrainian forces out of the Russian region of Kursk, hours after Kyiv agreed with Washington to broker a 30-day ceasefire.
Ukrainian and US officials met in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday and backed the month-long cessation of hostilities along the entire Ukrainian frontline. In return, the US resumed military aid and intelligence sharing with Kyiv that had been suspended after last month’s bust-up in Oval Office between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“The US must convince Russia to do this,” Zelenskyy said in his evening address on Tuesday night.
Russian forces, however, made new advances in the Kursk region, threatening to push out Ukrainian troops who have occupied territory there since last summer. On Wednesday, Russian state media shared footage it said showed Russian soldiers in the centre of Sudzha, the main municipality where Ukraine had set up a command centre.
In February, Zelenskyy insisted the Russian territories held by Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region could be used as a bargaining chip in peace negotiations.
“I don’t think they’ll be ready to stop in Sudzha,” said Solomiia Bobrovska, a Ukrainian opposition MP and member of the committee on national security and intelligence. “Every time the Russians have signed something, they started an offensive operation immediately”.
For Ukraine, a ceasefire being negotiated just as Ukrainian forces suffer military setbacks has painful echoes: in February 2015, Moscow pressured Kyiv to sign a ceasefire just as its troops were surrounding the eastern Ukrainian town of Debaltseve.
Russia repeatedly violated that ceasefire agreement — a precedent Zelenskyy brought up at the White House, prompting Trump to lose his temper and conclude that the Ukrainian leader was not interested in ending the conflict.
“Putin will try to fill Trump’s ears with nothing, and Trump will have to decide what he does next” said Mykhailo Samus, a Ukrainian military analyst. He added that the US president was likely to offer Moscow the lifting of western sanctions in exchange for a ceasefire.
Ukrainian officials and European allies on Wednesday welcomed the restoration of US military assistance and the sharing of intelligence that Ukrainian forces use to hit targets beyond the frontline and detect Russian missile attacks ahead of time.
“This is an important signal to the whole world that the support to Ukraine is intact,” Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s top aide and leader of the Ukrainian delegation in Jeddah, wrote on Telegram.
Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski said on Wednesday that the US transit of military supplies to Ukraine via Poland had “returned to previous levels”, as had the Starlink satellite communications system owned by Trump adviser Elon Musk. Poland is paying for part of that service to Ukraine.
British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer congratulated Trump and Zelenskyy for their “remarkable breakthrough”, adding: “Russia must now agree to a ceasefire and an end to the fighting too.”
Starmer has spearheaded efforts with French President Emmanuel Macron to come up with a European “assurance force” deployed to Ukraine to deter Russia from attacking again. Starmer said he would reconvene leaders on Saturday “to discuss next steps”.
The Kremlin said it wanted to hear directly from the US before commenting on the ceasefire proposal. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that Russia expected the US to “inform us of the details of the talks and the agreements that were reached”.
A call between Putin and Trump could be organised “very quickly”, Peskov said, but added that the White House had yet to request one.
Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service said on Wednesday that its director Sergei Naryshkin had spoken by phone with his US counterpart, CIA chief John Ratcliffe, with the two agencies agreeing to keep up regular contact.
Konstantin Kosachev, chair of Russia’s foreign affairs committee in the upper house, said the “Ukrainians are agreeing with what they are being told”, adding that this would not be the case with Russia, because “Russia is on the offensive”.
Even as Russian forces kept pressing ahead in the Kursk region, advances on the rest of the frontline seemed to stall. Ukrainian troops managed in recent days to hold back Russian assaults around the logistical hub of Pokrovsk, and even launched daring counter-attacks towards the centre of Toretsk, an industrial city Russian forces reached in August.
On the Pokrovsk front, one drone operator reacted to the news of the suggested ceasefire with one Ukrainian word: pobachymo — “We’ll see”.
Additional reporting by Raphael Minder in Warsaw and Henry Foy in Brussels.
