The United States said on Tuesday it has reached separate agreements with Ukraine and Russia to ensure safe navigation in the Black Sea and to implement a ban on attacks by the two countries on each other’s energy facilities.
The agreements, if implemented, would represent the clearest progress yet towards a wider ceasefire that Washington sees a stepping stone towards peace talks to bring an end to Russia’s three-year-old war in Ukraine.
Russia, however, said it could not trust Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and it could therefore only sign a Black Sea deal if Washington issued an “order” to him to respect it.
“We will need clear guarantees. And given the sad experience of agreements with just Kyiv, the guarantees can only be the result of an order from Washington to Zelenskiy and his team to do one thing and not the other,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in televised comments.
It was not immediately clear whether Moscow’s demand risked derailing the deal. Zelenskiy has previously said Russian President Vladimir Putin, who sent his army into Ukraine in February 2022, is not to be trusted over peace moves.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov said Kyiv had agreed to both a maritime ceasefire and a pause by Russia and Ukraine in attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure.
But he said Kyiv would regard any movement of Russian military vessels outside the eastern part of the Black Sea as a violation and a threat.
In this case Ukraine would have the full right to exercise self-defence, he said.
Seeking to fulfil a pledge by President Donald Trump to end the war quickly, the U.S. originally proposed a full 30-day ceasefire – to which Ukraine agreed in principle on March 11 – as a step towards peace talks.
But the Americans held separate talks in Saudi Arabia with Russia and Ukraine this week to discuss more limited ceasefires on energy and at sea, after Putin responded to the wider truce plan with a long list of conditions and questions.
Trump is pressing both sides to bring a swift end to the war, something he promised to achieve when he ran for president last year.
At the same time he is pursuing a rapid rapprochement with Moscow that both sides say could lead to lucrative business opportunities and cooperation across a wide range of areas, from minerals to sport and space exploration.
Ukraine and its European allies fear Trump could strike a hasty deal with Putin that undermines their security and caves in to Russian demands, including for Kyiv to abandon its NATO ambitions and give up the entirety of four regions claimed by Russia as its own. Ukraine has rejected that as tantamount to surrender.