Russia dismisses ceasefire plan as ‘respite for Kyiv’

Yuri Ushakov, a top Kremlin aide, has said a proposed ceasefire represents “nothing more than a temporary respite” for Ukraine as officials in Russia continued to dismiss US proposals for a 30-day truce.

“I have stated our position that this is nothing other than a temporary respite for the Ukrainian military, nothing more,” Ushakov said in a TV interview.

“It seems to me that no one needs any steps that merely imitate peaceful actions in this situation.”

Sir Keir Starmer has said that a weakened Ukraine would be a “chokehold on our future” during a speech this morning.

He stressed that economic security was vital to projecting “strength abroad”, adding: “Look, you’re not strong if your energy security is exploited by Putin.

“You’re not strong if one in eight young people are not in education or work, and you’re not strong if you lose control of your public finances and you can’t build your industries.”

The prime minister said that President Putin’s “appetite for conflict … will only grow”.

• Watch live as PM announces plans for reforming ‘flabby’ British state

Four Ukrainians have been killed and 14 injured in Russian attacks overnight in Donetsk, the Ukrainian governor of the eastern region, Vadym Filashkin, wrote in a Facebook post this morning.

Over 100 residential buildings had been damaged, he said.

The governor of Kherson, Oleksandr Prokudin, said a 68-year-old man had died and an 85-year-old man had been wounded in a Russian drone attack last night.

European plans to deploy peacekeeping troops to Ukraine are “provocative”, the Russian foreign ministry’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said.

European soldiers in Ukraine would mean “direct armed conflict”, Zakharova said.

She added that Ukraine was trying to negotiate “from a position of supposed strength”, but was actually demonstrating its weakness.

The Kremlin has doubled down on its insistence that it will not cede any territory that it annexed in eastern Ukraine as part of a peace deal.

Dmitry Peskov, spokesman to President Putin, said: “Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk — these are regions of the Russian Federation; they are written into the constitution. This is a certainty.”

Russia is in only partial control of the four regions but claims them in their entirety. Putin announced “accession treaties” with the Russia-installed “leaders” of the regions in September 2022, formalising the largest forcible takeover of territory in Europe since the Second World War.

On Wednesday President Zelensky said that recognising Russian-occupied land in Ukraine would be one of his “red lines” in negotiations.

Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, suggested on Monday that Ukraine would need to make territorial concessions as part of any agreement to end the war.

The Kremlin is reportedly asking companies to propose which sanctions Russia should seek to have lifted before talks with Washington.

Russian industry insiders told Reuters that payment issues and energy sanctions were among the most onerous restrictions that they wanted to be lifted.

One person said the ministry had been distributing a form for businesses to fill out, asking companies which sanctions had affected their business most and to identify the most sensitive restrictions. Reuters could not access a copy of the form.

Russia’s industry ministry has not commented.

Battlefield data from leading think tanks shows the location of the strongest fighting in Ukraine yesterday.

Moscow’s forces have taken back full control of the town of Sudzha in Russia’s Kursk region from Ukrainian troops, the Russian defence ministry has claimed, a day after President Putin visited the area.

The Russian troops had retaken Sudzha and two nearby villages, Podol and Melovoy, the ministry said. Major General Apti Alaudinov later told Russian media that troops had recaptured all villages around Sudzha.

Sudzha was the most significant settlement seized by Ukraine during its incursion into Kursk last August. Its fall would represent a big setback for Kyiv as Sudzha has served as an important supply route and a key staging area.

Ukraine has not confirmed the loss of Sudzha but analysts from the Institute for the Study of War think tank and Ukraine’s DeepState monitoring group reported yesterday that Russia had partially or fully seized Sudzha.

Moscow would “respond with all means” to the presence of foreign troops or bases in Ukraine, Maria Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, told reporters this morning.

Her comments follow a series of sharp rebukes from the Kremlin to Sir Keir Starmer’s efforts to help build a “coalition of the willing”, which could see British boots on the ground, alongside troops from other Nato and European countries, as a peacekeeping force after a potential ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.

Zakharova also stressed that the US appeared to be distancing itself from such plans, adding that Washington “understands” what this could lead to.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said in a press conference today that he had “no doubt that the Kursk region will be liberated fairly soon”.

However, he cautioned it would “take as much time as is necessary to preserve as many lives as possible of our troops and peaceful residents”.

“The president has said that this needs to be done as soon as possible,” he added.

Finland and Ukraine have signed a bilateral defence co-operation agreement, Finland’s defence ministry has announced.

The two countries have agreed to deepen their defence co-operation, including on armaments, exchange of intelligence as well as production of ammunition, the ministry said.

Finland will also give a new £168 million military aid package to Ukraine.

Steve Witkoff’s plane has now landed at Vnukovo airport outside Moscow, the Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti has reported.

President Trump’s special envoy is expected to meet with Russian officials later today.

On US negotiators arriving in Russia today, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said: “It’s true that [US] negotiators are en route and it’s true that contacts are planned.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, we’ll tell you about them later.”

Ukraine’s entire stockpile of Atacms missiles has been depleted, according to reports.

The US-made long-range missiles have been provided by Washington throughout the conflict, but became prominent in November when Joe Biden lifted restrictions on Ukrainian troops firing into Russian territory.

The US provided fewer than 40 of the missiles, though, according to a US official, cited by the Associated Press.

Kyiv is thought to have run out in late January.

The Kremlin has said that Mike Waltz, the US national security adviser, spoke yesterday with Yuri Ushakov, President Putin’s foreign policy adviser and a former ambassador to Washington.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, also confirmed that American negotiators were flying to Russia today, without specifying who.

In a morning press conference, Peskov added that Putin may hold an “international telephone conversation” this evening, but did not give any further details.

A plane belonging to President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, has crossed the Russian border, the state-run Tass news agency said, citing the flight-tracking service Flightradar.

The report has not been independently verified.

Witkoff, a longtime business associate and golfing partner of Trump, has seen his duties expand well beyond his official brief of Middle East envoy, playing a growing role in efforts to bring about an end to the three-year-old Ukraine war.

• Can real estate mogul Steve Witkoff broker peace in Ukraine?

A total lack of experience did not disqualify Anna Tsivileva from a senior defence ministry job as Russia fought its war on Ukraine. Perhaps more relevant to her appointment as deputy defence minister in June last year is that she is a close relative of President Putin.

Tsivileva, 52, is the daughter of Evgeny Putin, the president’s cousin. In the past 12 months, she has been one of several members of Putin’s family to have taken on high-profile positions as the war has accelerated Russia’s slide into neo-Tsarism.

• The president’s relatives arriving in politics with a spate of blunders and scandal

Analysis by George Grylls

Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, will meet President Trump in Washington today at a critical moment for the defensive alliance.

Rutte is expected to try and convince Trump of the need for the US to maintain support for Europe and not to retreat into isolationism. He can point to Nato members, including the UK, increasing defence spending in response to Trump’s threats. He will also hope to win US security guarantees to uphold a ceasefire in Ukraine.

But Trump has said there is a “big, beautiful ocean” to separate the US from Europe and argued the US should focus its military resources on containing China.

Trump has suggested that the US will not defend countries that fail to rearm and called for Nato’s defence spending target to be lifted to 5 per cent of GDP.

Nato is increasingly nervous that Trump could withdraw the 80,000 US troops based in Europe.

Russia’s operation to push Ukrainian troops out of the Kursk region is nearly completed, the Kremlin has claimed as diplomacy intensifies over ending the war with Ukraine.

Dmitry Peskov, President Putin’s spokesman, said that on a visit to the region on Wednesday the president had been told by army commanders that its forces were “entering into its final stage of the operation to liberate Kursk region from the [Ukrainian] fighters who penetrated it”.

An overnight Russian attack on Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region injured three people and targeted energy facilities that power the state railways, according to local officials.

The attack on Dnipro injured three women, who were hospitalised, and blew out over 100 windows in the city’s apartment buildings, the region’s governor Serhiy Lysak wrote on Telegram.

Ukraine’s railway company said it made changes to train routes following the morning attack.

The drone attack also damaged an administrative building in the Kharkiv region and set around 20 garages on fire in the northeastern region of Sumy, according to regional officials.

Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian MP who now leads a shadow parliament in exile opposed to President Putin’s rule, said that Putin was likely to accept the offer of a truce but do everything in his power through subversion and manipulation to turn it to his favour.

Rather than accepting the ceasefire outright, he may demand certain conditions — for example presidential elections in Ukraine, the return of Ukrainian-held territory in the Kursk region or recognition of the territory Russia has already captured.

Ponomarev said he thought the stipulation of elections was most likely, as a means both to try to oust Zelensky and to buy more time to win over Trump. Putin would “try to use this time to settle with Trump on spheres of influence and to build mutual trust”, Ponomarev said, so that he could negotiate a more advantageous permanent settlement further down the line.

Russia has reportedly outlined its demands for ending the war in Ukraine and improving relations with the US as President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, is expected to visit Moscow today.

The demands were in broad agreement with previous conditions set by the Kremlin, two sources familiar with the diplomacy told Reuters.

Those earlier terms included no Nato membership for Kyiv, an agreement not to deploy foreign troops in Ukraine and international recognition of President Putin’s claim that Crimea and four partly occupied provinces of Ukraine belong to Russia.

These are terms which are widely thought to be unacceptable to Kyiv.

Reuters said that the full details of Moscow’s position were not clear, including whether the Kremlin would be willing to hold negotiations with Ukraine before its demands were met.

Analysis by Tom Ball

President Putin, long considered the grand master of geopolitical chess, finds himself outmanoeuvred.

When Steve Witkoff, the US envoy, lands in Moscow today to present a proposal for an immediate 30-day ceasefire, the Russian president will face a situation known in chess terms as a zugzwang: forced into making a move that he does not want to make.

As he has failed to achieve any of his primary objectives in his all-out invasion of Ukraine, an end to hostilities is not in Putin’s interests. At the cost of between 150,000 and 200,000 Russian lives, he has captured roughly 11 per cent of Ukrainian territory since 2022 and none of the big cities he wanted.

In any case, this war was never about land. It was an attempt to decapitate Ukraine’s pro-western leadership and return the country to Moscow’s dominion. Three years on, President Zelensky’s government still stands and Kyiv is more integrated with the West than ever before.

• Will Putin agree to the Ukraine ceasefire? His options explained

Russia downed 77 Ukrainian drones overnight two days after Kyiv carried out its largest direct strike on Moscow since the start of the war.

Thirty drones were intercepted and destroyed over the western Bryansk region bordering Ukraine while 25 more were downed over Kaluga, Russia’s defence ministry said this morning.

More drones were intercepted over the regions of Kursk, Voronezh, Rostov and Belgorod, it added.

On Tuesday Russia downed more than 90 drones around Moscow and intercepted 337 Ukrainian drones across the country.

The Ukrainian authorities in Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk also reported attacks overnight.

The Ukrainian military said it had shot down 74 out of 117 drones launched by Russia. Another 38 drones did not reach their targets due to electronic countermeasures, the military added in a statement on Telegram.

Poland’s president has urged the US to transfer nuclear weapons to its territory as a deterrent against future Russian aggression.

“The borders of Nato moved east in 1999, so 26 years later there should also be a shift of the Nato infrastructure east. For me this is obvious,” President Duda told the Financial Times.

Duda said he recently discussed the proposal with President Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg.

The request is likely to be seen as a highly provocative one by Moscow.

Video showed Putin arriving at a command post in the Kursk region, dressed unusually in military fatigues.

He ordered the army to drive Ukraine’s forces out of the region “in the shortest time possible”.

“I am counting on the fact that all the combat tasks facing our units will be fulfilled, and the territory of the Kursk region will soon be completely liberated from the enemy,” he said.

He added: “People who are in the Kursk region, who commit crimes against civilians here, who oppose our armed forces, law enforcement agencies and special services … are the people we should certainly treat as terrorists.”

President Putin has visited the Kursk region where his army chief told him that Moscow’s forces were expected to retake all the Ukrainian-held territory inside the Russian region.

Its military had already retaken 86 per cent of the territory taken by Ukraine and captured 400 soldiers, Valery Gerasimov, chief of Russia’s general staff, told the president.

It was Putin’s first time visiting the region since a shock incursion last summer saw Ukraine seize a part of the region — widely regarded as a key bargaining chip for any future negotiations.