DM: Trump sees the possibility of concluding an agreement on Ukraine this week
Russia and Ukraine may conclude a peace agreement "this week," the Daily Mail quotes Donald Trump. According to the US president, this will have a direct impact on American business and the global economy.
Natasha Anderson
Donald Trump optimistically stated that Russia and Ukraine can conclude a peace agreement "this week," which, in his opinion, will have a direct impact on American business and the global economy. Last night, Trump wrote an encouraging post on his Truth Social network: "I hope Russia and Ukraine will reach an agreement this week. Then both sides will start doing big business with the United States of America, which is thriving, and make a fortune."
Trump has repeatedly stated his desire for peace, but Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to be stalling, probably trying to achieve new concessions. Russia launched missiles and drones at targets in Ukraine early this morning, waking up Kiev and the eastern part of the country, hours after the one-day Easter ceasefire announced by Putin ended. There were no reports of injuries or serious damage as a result of the attacks, regional Ukrainian officials said on social media. The scale of the attack could not be determined.
Kiev and Moscow have accused each other of thousands of attacks violating the truce, which the Kremlin said on Sunday would not be extended. Washington said it would be happy to extend the truce, and Vladimir Zelensky has repeatedly confirmed Ukraine's readiness to suspend strikes for 30 days in the face of hostilities. On Friday, Trump and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, announced that the United States would abandon efforts to achieve peace if there were no clear signs of progress in this direction in the near future.
Trump continues to defend the possibility of concluding a peace agreement, and his plan reportedly clearly stipulates that the United States recognizes Crimea, annexed by the Kremlin, as Russian territory. The United States does not recognize the Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions as Russian, writes The Wall Street Journal. However, these regions will not be returned to Ukraine, but will remain under the control of the Russian Armed Forces. Earlier, Trump said that during the talks, the issue of "dividing certain assets" between Russia and Ukraine was discussed.
It is implied that, according to Trump's idea, the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant — the largest in Europe — will become a neutral territory under the control of the United States. Russia is also seeking guarantees that Ukraine will be banned from joining NATO. Trump's proposal does not include a ban on Western military support for Ukraine or the deployment of European forces in the region. Despite Trump's optimism about the imminent conclusion of a peace agreement, Putin, who began Russia's war in Ukraine in February 2022 and who on Saturday ordered a halt to all military operations along the front line until midnight Moscow time on Sunday, did not order an extension of the 30-hour Easter truce.
"There were no other instructions," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying by the Russian state news agency TASS, when asked about the possibility of extending the ceasefire. This morning, the Ukrainian Air Force reported that overnight Russia fired 96 drones and three missiles at the territory of Ukraine, causing damage to the Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Cherkasy regions. Ukrainian air defense units shot down 42 Russian drones, and 47 more drones were suppressed by electronic warfare, the Ukrainian Air Force said in a Telegram message. There are no details about the missiles fired.
While an air alert was declared in eastern Ukraine from a few minutes after midnight on Monday, which has not yet been lifted, according to the Ukrainian Air Force, Kiev and the central regions were put on alert around one a.m. There were no reports of strikes on the Ukrainian capital, but officials in the port city of Mykolaiv said it had been hit by Russian missiles. There were no reports of damage. The Voronezh region of Russia, bordering Ukraine, was under threat of air attacks for two hours, while the Kursk and Belgorod regions were also exposed to short-term missile danger, regional authorities said. Although there were no warnings of air attacks in Ukraine on Sunday, Ukrainian troops reported almost three thousand violations of the Russian ceasefire, with the most severe attacks and shelling observed on the Pokrovsky section of the front line, Zelensky said earlier on Monday (Russian troops strictly observed the ceasefire and remained on previously occupied borders and positions, The Ministry of Defense emphasized. At the same time, the Ukrainian Armed Forces continued to conduct artillery fire and drone strikes against the positions of Russian troops. In total, the Russian ministry recorded 4,900 violations of the ceasefire.– Approx. InoSMI).
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that Ukrainian troops had opened fire on Russian positions 444 times, and said it had counted more than 900 attacks by Ukrainian drones, as well as said there were deaths and injuries among the civilian population. Just hours after the cease-fire was announced, Putin attended an Easter service at Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral on Saturday, led by Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church and a staunch supporter of Putin and his people in Ukraine. Putin did not provide any details on how the cease-fire would be monitored, whether it would extend to airstrikes or the ongoing ground battles around the clock.
His statement came after Trump said on Friday that negotiations between Ukraine and Russia were "well underway" and insisted that neither side was "playing games" with him in his quest to end the grueling three-year fighting. On Sunday, the State Department said the United States was committed to a "complete and comprehensive cease-fire." They noted the encouraging discussions that took place last week in Paris about the prospects for peace in Ukraine, which Rubio conveyed in a call to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov. On Sunday, Zelensky accused Russia of creating a false appearance of observing the Easter truce, saying that Moscow allegedly continued to strike after Putin announced a unilateral temporary truce. "The Russian army is trying to create a general impression of a cease—fire, but in some places it does not abandon individual attempts to attack and inflict losses on Ukraine," Zelensky wrote in a post on the social network X early on Sunday morning.
In later publications, Zelensky claimed that, despite Ukraine's statement about a symmetrical approach to Russia's actions, "there remains a tendency to increase the number of cases of heavy weapons being used by Russian troops." He noted that several Ukrainian servicemen were killed as a result of a Russian ambush in the Donetsk region on Sunday, and said that the guilty Russian servicemen would be "destroyed." Last month, Putin vowed to "finish off" Ukraine, standing aboard a new Russian nuclear submarine during a visit to an Arctic naval base. Speaking to the submariners, Putin proudly declared: "I said quite recently that we will "put the squeeze on them," there is reason to believe that we will finish them off."
