Russia said it was waiting for an update from Washington on the results of talks between US and Ukrainian negotiators on White House peace proposals.
Kyiv’s military, meanwhile, said its forces were still fighting for the small eastern city of Pokrovsk amid reports that some of its troops had pulled back to escape the threat of being surrounded.
“We haven’t heard any specific statements from Kyiv, and we haven’t heard the results yet,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday of talks over the weekend in Florida between Ukrainian and US negotiators.
“It is now important for us to understand what the results of that work are,” he added. “We do not know what differences of opinion there are exactly.”
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Mr Peskov spoke to media in Russia as Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy was meeting the leaders of Britain, France and Germany in London to talk about proposals for a peace plan that US envoys have presented to Moscow and Kyiv.
“There are visions of the US, Russia and Ukraine - and we don’t have a unified view on Donbas,” Mr Zelenskiy told Bloomberg early on Monday, referring to an area of eastern Ukraine that the Kremlin reportedly wants to occupy in its entirety as part any peace deal – even though about 250,000 Ukrainian citizens still live there and Kyiv still controls its heavily fortified cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk.
In line with many of his previous statements, US president Donald Trump on Sunday night portrayed Ukraine as the impediment to a peace deal,
“I’m a little bit disappointed that president Zelenskiy hasn’t yet read the proposal … His people love it, but he hasn’t (read it),” Mr Trump said. “Russia is, I believe, fine with it, but I’m not sure that Zelenskiy is fine with it.”
That ran counter to comments earlier on Sunday from top Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov, who said certain US proposals “require the Americans to make serious, I would say radical, changes to their documents, which are constantly in flux and constantly being prepared.”
Mr Putin said last week that Russia would take all of the Donbas area – which comprises Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions – either by force or through Kyiv’s negotiated withdrawal.
Ukraine’s military says it is still fighting for partially occupied Pokrovsk and still has a foothold in northern districts of a small city that has been an important logistical hub for Kyiv’s forces since Russia began its all-out invasion in February 2022.
The respected Ukrainska Pravda news outlet quoted soldiers serving with two Ukrainian units in the area as saying that some troops had retreated northwards in recent weeks to avoid potential encirclement between Pokrovsk and the neighbouring town of Myrnohrad.
