'We won't accept Ukraine ceasefire while Zelenskyy remains in power,' Russia warns
1 April 2025, 23:14 | Updated: 1 April 2025, 23:17
Russia will not accept Donald Trump’s Ukraine peace plan while Zelenskyy remains in power, the Kremlin has said.
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Peace talks have stalled in recent weeks with Donald Trump declaring he is "very angry and p***** off" with Vladimir Putin for blocking a deal.
Russia’s indication that no ceasefire will be agreed while Volodymyr Zelenskyy comes after Trump threatened to impose secondary tariffs on Russian oil unless a deal can be made to “stop the bloodshed.”
But a Kremlin minister has warned Russia will never agree to a peace plan while the so-called “root causes” for its invasion of Ukraine remain in place.
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In Russia, the term “root cause” is used as shorthand for Ukraine’s Western-allied government.
“We have not heard from Trump a signal to Kyiv to end the war,” Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said.
“All that exists today is an attempt to find some kind of scheme that would first allow us to achieve a ceasefire, as imagined by the Americans, and then move on to some other models and schemes. [But] as far as we can see, there is no place in them today for our main demand; namely to resolve the problems related to the root causes of this conflict.”
He added: “We take the models and solutions proposed by the Americans very seriously, but we can’t accept all this as it is.”
It comes after the White House said on Tuesday Trump was becoming “frustrated” with both Russia and Ukraine.
Trump recently declared he was “very angry and p***** off with Putin” as peace talks continued to stall.
He said that comments made by Putin last Friday, in which he called for a "transitional government" to take power in Ukraine in place of Zelenskyy were "not going in the right direction".
Trump told NBC: “If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault — which it might not be — but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia.
“That would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States. There will be a 25% tariff on all oil, a 25- to 50-point tariff on all oil.”
