President Vladimir Putin said Russia was ready for a ceasefire, but suggested that Ukraine would need to accept further conditions before an agreement could be reached.
“We agree with the proposals to stop the hostilities,” the Russian leader said Thursday at a news conference. While Russia would support a pause in the fighting “there are issues that need to be discussed,” he said, adding that he may need to “have a phone call with Trump.”
In an apparent response to Putin's statements, President Donald Trump said Thursday that the Russian leader put out "a promising statement," but that he would like to see Russia agree to a ceasefire.
Speaking from the the Oval Office during a meeting with NATO chief Mark Rutte, Trump said he hoped Russia would "do the right thing," adding that "serious discussions" with Putin and others are underway.
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When asked if he was willing to meet with Putin, Trump said, “I’d love to meet with him and talk to him.”
Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in Moscow Thursday and is expected to meet with Putin.
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Putin had expressed concern that the temporary ceasefire suggested by the U.S. and Ukraine would give Kyiv's forces an opportunity to regroup and questioned the mechanisms for preventing this during a potential ceasefire. Details like who would monitor and enforce the truce would also need to be considered, he said.
Putin has long held maximalist demands for ending a war in which Russia believes it has the upper hand. He has previously said that he wants Ukraine to withdraw from its regions partly occupied by Russia — essentially giving even more land to the Kremlin — while promising never to join NATO and protecting Russian culture and language inside the country.
Earlier Thursday, he urged his own soldiers to secure a quick and decisive victory while on a visit to the front lines.
Putin's statement was Moscow's first public reaction to the temporary 30-day ceasefire plan sketched out by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Ukrainian counterparts in Saudi Arabia this week. President Donald Trump has suggested he could hit Russia with sanctions if it rejected the proposal.
Earlier on Thursday, Putin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov called the outlined plan "nothing else than a temporary respite for the Ukrainian military, nothing more."
He told Russian state media that the country's "goal is still a long-term peaceful settlement... [that] takes into account the legitimate interests of our country."
"Steps that imitate peaceful actions, it seems to me, are of no use to anyone," he added, saying that he conveyed that position to U.S. national security adviser Mike Waltz in a phone call Wednesday.
Putin, a former KGB agent, was dressed in military fatigues as he visited Kursk, the only region of Russia partly occupied by Ukrainian troops. Soon after, the Russian Defense Ministry said it had recaptured the town of Sudzha, the largest settlement previously occupied by Ukrainian forces.
“Our task in the near future, in the shortest possible time frame, is to decisively defeat the enemy entrenched in the Kursk region,” Putin said. He also suggested creating “a security zone” on the border.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday in a media briefing that “there is no doubt that the Kursk region will be liberated soon enough.”
Rubio may discuss the war when he meets Thursday with the top diplomats at the Group of Seven, or G-7, summit in Quebec City, a potentially awkward appointment, given that Trump has repeatedly said he wants to take over Canada.
American and Russian officials have this week been talking behind the scenes. Trump had dispatched Witkoff to Russia, while threatening sanctions against the Kremlin.
“I can do things financially that would be very bad for Russia,” Trump said Wednesday in the Oval Office. “I don’t want to do that because I want to get peace.”
Despite this threat, Trump has asked the Kremlin for few concessions, while openly suggesting that Ukraine will have to agree to many of Putin’s demands.
The suggestion from talks in Saudi Arabia of an interim 30-day ceasefire has been welcomed by European leaders. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned in his nightly address Wednesday about Russia's history of breaking truces.
“The key is our partners’ ability to ensure that Russia is ready not to deceive, but to truly end the war,” he said.
Ukrainian officials and citizens say they want peace, but only alongside security guarantees that ensure the Kremlin does not attack again.
“I think 99% of Ukrainians wants the war to end in a fair way,” Vitaliy Kim, governor of Mykolaiv oblast, told NBC News on Wednesday. “We want some guarantees that it will not come back in a couple of years.”
Here, in the southern city of Mykolaiv, some residents are deeply unimpressed by what they see as Trump’s attempts to force Ukraine into an unfavorable and risky settlement.
It’s like “a young child’s tricks,” said Yuriy, 46, a construction worker pushing a baby in a stroller near the city’s memorial for dead soldiers. “My daughter is acting in her 1-month life better than Trump in his 70-plus years. She at least s---- in her diapers, and that guy s---- on the whole world.”
One country taking no chances is Poland, the former Eastern Bloc nation that raised defense spending to 4.7% this year and is among Russia’s most vocal critics.
Polish President Andrzej Duda told the Financial Times newspaper Thursday that he wanted the U.S. to redeploy American nuclear weapons from Western Europe to inside his country.
“There should also be a shift of the NATO infrastructure east,” he said. “For me, this is obvious.”
NBC News' Gabe Joselow contributed.
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