Donald Trump said ‘it takes two to tango’ with pressure on Russia to sign up to the peace deal-

Donald Trump will challenge Vladimir Putin to agree to a 30-day ceasefire after securing Ukraine’s approval for his plan to bring about an end to the war.

The US president is expected to call his Russian counterpart this week and said “it takes two to tango” after Kyiv’s offer to lay down its arms in what would be the first negotiated pause in fighting since Moscow’s invasion three years ago.

Speaking in Riyadh after talks with a Ukrainian delegation lasted more than eight hours, Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said that the “ball is now in Russia’s court” and that he hoped “Russia will answer yes as quickly as possible”.

“If they say no,” he added, “then we’ll know unfortunately what is the impediment to peace here”.

On Tuesday, “massive shelling” hit Dnipro, while four people were killed in Odesa, according to local press, as Russia gave no indication it would agree to the truce.

In the Saudi capital, Ukraine expressed its readiness for a ceasefire after the US agreed to immediately restart intelligence-sharing and weapons deliveries.

Volodymyr Zelensky, who was not present at the talks, said the agreement showed that “Ukraine is ready for peace”.

“Russia must show its readiness to end the war or continue the war,” the Ukrainian president added. “It is time for the full truth.”

Mr Zelensky, who has been at loggerheads with the Trump administration after a disastrous White House summit last month, made sure to personally thank the president for the move towards peace.

“I want to thank President Trump for the constructiveness of our teams’ conversation,” he said, adding that the US must now “convince” Putin to sign up to the deal.

The terms of the ceasefire went further than a joint British-and-French proposal for a halt in the fighting at sea and in the air, Mr Zelensky noted.

The US proposal would not only stop “missile, drone, and bomb attacks” and the conflict in the Black Sea, but bring an end to fighting “along the entire frontline”.

One Ukrainian MP labelled the proposed ceasefire a “great result” for Ukraine.

Oleksiy Goncharenko, the MP for Odesa, told The Telegraph: “We need peace, it’s a real breakthrough. The most important thing is that we have a real result in military aid and intelligence being resumed.”

Mr Goncharenko, whose People’s Deputy party is in opposition to Mr Zelensky’s government, said it provided Putin with a “real dilemma” but he added he had “no confidence” that the Russian president would sign a deal.

“Now we will see the true face of Putin, I am sure he doesn’t want peace. If he starts to play games with Trump, it will be time for Trump to put pressure on him. He only understands force.”

‘Important moment’

Sir Keir Starmer said: “This is an important moment for peace in Ukraine and we now all need to redouble our efforts to get to a lasting and secure peace as soon as possible.

“As both American and Ukrainian delegations have said, the ball is now in the Russian court. Russia must now agree to a ceasefire and an end to the fighting, too.”

In Washington, Mr Trump said “hopefully Russia will agree” to the ceasefire and he announced that he had invited Mr Zelensky back to the White House.

Appearing to refer to Mr Zelensky’s last White House visit, Mr Trump said: “I think it’s a big difference between the last visit you saw in the Oval Office, and this.”

A Ukrainian official said the proposed ceasefire was “partly” designed to call Putin’s bluff over whether he was genuinely committed to peace talks.

“Let’s see what happens, but I give it less than a 50 per cent chance that they [Russia] will agree,” the official told The Telegraph.

It came as Emmanuel Macron, the French president, told European military chiefs they had to “move from a concept to a plan” for “creditable security guarantees” for Ukraine as peace negotiations were accelerated.

“This is the moment when Europe must pull out all the stops, for Ukraine, and for itself,” Mr Macron said at the meeting of more than 30 members of the Anglo-French “coalition of the willing”.

On Wednesday, John Healey, the Defence Secretary, will meet his counterparts from France, Germany, Italy and Poland at the Val-de-Grace chapel in Paris to discuss how to secure a lasting peace in Ukraine and strengthen deterrence through Nato.

At the close of the Riyadh talks, a joint Ukraine-US statement announced that both countries’ presidents hoped to sign a mineral resources deal as soon as possible.

Mr Zelensky left Washington on Feb 28 without signing the deal, which would see the US commit to extracting Ukraine’s natural resources in return for a 50 per cent share in future profits.

Before the ceasefire deal was announced, Kyiv launched its largest drone attack on Russia since the war began, with Moscow claiming it intercepted 337 drones targeted at the mainland.

Russia’s defence ministry said 91 drones were shot down over Moscow, but three men were killed after some broke through to strike flats, a railway station and an agricultural distribution centre.

Steve Witkoff, Mr Trump’s Middle East Envoy, will travel to the Russian capital later this week for a second personal meeting with Putin.

Western intelligence sources have stated that the Russian leader appears unwilling to bend on his “maximalist” goals of dismantling the Kyiv regime.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Putin had no intention of dropping extreme demands on land, Ukrainian neutrality and the rejection of European peacekeepers. He was prepared to continue the war if his demands were not met, Western security officials told the news agency.

Senator Lindsey Graham said that should Moscow refuse to agree to the ceasefire, the US should increase sanctions on Russia.

Mr Trump said earlier this month that Putin had told him he would accept a European-led peacekeeping force in Ukraine after a ceasefire was agreed. But on Tuesday, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, repeated his rejection of the idea in the only official response given to the plans so far.

“What will the peacekeepers protect? The remnants of the Kyiv Nazi regime?” he said.

Meanwhile, Russia’s army made new gains in the western region of Kursk on Tuesday, according to the defence ministry, accelerating its push to drive out Ukrainian forces who have been clinging to a slice of Russian territory since last August.

Viktor Sobolev, a former Russian army commander and Duma representative, said he believed the Kremlin would reject the US proposal.

“The US will rearm Ukraine in 30 days of ceasefire and start the war anew – Russia will not go for it,” he said. “I think that this is completely unacceptable.”

However, Maria Zakharova, a spokesman for the Russian foreign ministry, told RIA Novosti: “We will not rule out contacts with US representatives over the next few days.”

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Opinion - 5 uncomfortable truths about Trump and Russia

Let’s not mince words. Here are five highly uncomfortable facts about President Trump and his regime.

First, by undermining Ukraine’s ability to protect its civilian population against intensifying Russian missile and drone onslaughts, Trump has effectively endorsed Vladimir Putin’s genocidal war. As the military historian Phillips O’Brien puts it, we just experienced “The Week the USA Started Killing Ukrainians.”

Trump and his sycophantic subordinates and supporters don’t care, of course, but history will judge them severely. As might, at some point, the International Criminal Court. That Trump may justify the violence done to innocent Ukrainians by his desire to force Ukraine to the negotiating table with Russia doesn’t get him off the complicity hook.

Second, Trump is an imperialist. By laying claim to Greenland and the Panama Canal in his recent address before Congress, he has made their eventual appropriation by the U.S. official White House policy. He has also told Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that he intends to revisit and presumably adjust America’s border with Canada.

Once again, I doubt Trump and his acolytes care, but history — and most formerly colonial states — will judge them severely.

Third, Trump will, perhaps unwittingly, embroil the globe in World War III. His enabling of Putin will inevitably encourage attempts by other genocidally-inclined warmongering states to follow in his footsteps. The result will be still more armed conflict, increased national intolerance, the galvanization of terrorism and growing global instability — all of which will eventually involve the great powers and their allies in a major conflagration.

Trump and his sycophants will disagree, of course, claiming that they want only peace and that the real perpetrators of war are its victims, such as Ukraine. But history won’t be fooled by their shameful rhetoric and will judge them for what they are.

Fourth, Trump is a wannabe dictator, perhaps even a wannabe fascist — terms I don’t use lightly. Dictators rule with total power (something Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky utterly lacks). Trump hasn’t achieved that degree of totality (something that Putin has), but he appears dead set on doing so in his second term. And his chances of succeeding look at least even.

Fascists, meanwhile, are popular, charismatic dictators with personality cults, with Italy’s Benito Mussolini being the quintessential example. Trump falls short on the total-power scale, but he does well on popularity, charisma and cult, and thereby qualifies for the modifier “fascistic.”

Taken together, these four facts highlight a fifth — that Trump is becoming less and less distinguishable from Putin. The Kremlin’s boss is an active genocidaire, an imperialist, a warmonger and a longstanding fascist dictator. Trump still has some way to go in each of these respects, but his goals are clear and the progress he’s made in just a few weeks bodes ill for the future of American democracy and international order. After all, his actions speak louder than his words.

It is small wonder that Trump and his team have swallowed Putin’s narrative, hook, line and sinker. Hence his allegations that Ukraine is the perpetrator of war and genocide, that Zelensky is illegitimate and that the “Kyiv regime” is fascist. In contrast, he frames Russia as the victim of evil Ukrainian designs and Putin is a democrat par excellence. Small wonder as well that Trump’s worshipful MAGA base and its spokesman Tucker Carlson have also swallowed the Russian narrative.

Putin’s propaganda of war, imperialism, genocide and dictatorship has long roots in imperial and Soviet Russian political culture. Trump’s aspirations figure far less prominently in the American mind. Few Americans want genocide, empire, war and dictatorship, especially today.

Unfortunately, Russian political culture and its unsavory dimensions will change only if Russia suffers a massive defeat and the Russian people come to their senses. With Trump propping up Putin, such an outcome looks unlikely.

The good news is that Trump’s project will, sooner or later, come into conflict with American values and meet an ignominious end — though not before having wreaked enormous damage on the U.S. and the world.

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Ukraine Agrees to Cease-Fire Proposal, U.S. to Restore Military Support

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