Russian President Vladimir Putin has offered an immediate cease-fire with Ukraine, setting out conditions that Kyiv has already rejected just a day before a peace summit in Switzerland from which he was excluded.
During a speech at the Foreign Ministry in Moscow on June 14, Putin laid out the terms of his proposal: the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from its territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhya, which Russia has claimed, and an end to Kyiv's NATO aspirations.
“We will do it [end Russia's offensive] immediately,” Putin said.
The terms Putin laid out, which have been mooted by Russian officials several times in the past, were once again rejected by Ukraine, while NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg slammed the conditions as a path to "more aggression, more occupation."
"There is no novelty in this, no real peace proposal, and no desire to end the war," Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said in a post on X.
"But there is a desire not to pay for this war and to continue it in new formats. It's all a complete sham. Therefore -- once again -- get rid of illusions and stop taking seriously the 'proposals of Russia' that are offensive to common sense."
There are no new "peace proposals" from #Russia. Entity Putin has voiced only the "standard aggressor%27s set", which has been heard many times already. Its content is quite specific, highly offensive to international law and speaks absolutely eloquently about the incapacity of the…
— Михайло Подоляк (@Podolyak_M) June 14, 2024
Putin presented his conditions ahead of a June 15-16 Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland, to which he was not invited.
Leaders and representatives of more than 70 countries are scheduled to meet in the Swiss resort of Burgenstock to chart a way forward to end the war in Ukraine.
Ukraine hopes to win broad international backing for its vision of the terms needed to end the war with Russia.
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A draft of a communique for the peace summit seen by RFE/RL says future peace negotiations should involve "representatives of all parties" in the conflict.
The United States will be represented by Vice President Kamala Harris and national-security adviser Jake Sullivan, while French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will also attend the summit.
Russia has dismissed the significance of the summit, saying it “makes no sense” to hold discussions on ending the hostilities without Moscow.
"This is not a proposal made in good faith," Stoltenberg said of Putin's offer following a meeting of defense ministers in Brussels on June 14. "This is a proposal that actually means that Russia should achieve their war aims by expecting that Ukrainians should give up significantly more land than Russia has been able to occupy so far."
Putin also restated a demand for Ukraine's demilitarization and said an end to international sanctions must be included in a peace deal.
He also repeated his call for Ukraine's "denazification," a nod to his often voiced but baseless slur against Kyiv's leadership.
Russia has blamed Ukraine's preliminary steps to joining NATO as one of the main reasons it launched what it calls a "special military operation" against Ukraine in February 2022.
NATO leaders will hold a summit in Washington next month, though Kyiv is not expected to receive a full invitation to join the alliance.
The alliance stated in the final declaration of last year's summit in Vilnius that "Ukraine’s future is in NATO," though U.S. President Joe Biden has Ukraine will not join NATO while it is at war.