MOSKOU (REUTERS) – The circumstances of President Vladimir Putin for ending the war in Ukraine include a requirement that western leaders promise to stop increasing NATO -Oostward and to lift some of the sanctions against Russia, according to three Russian sources with knowledge of the negotiations.
President Donald Trump repeatedly said that he wants to end the deadly European conflict since the Second World War and in recent days shown more and more frustration with Putin, warning on Tuesday that the Russian leader 'played with fire' by refusing to stop Kyiv with Kyiv then made his troops on the battlefield.
After spoken to Trump for more than two hours last week, Putin said he had agreed to Ukraine to a memorandum that would establish the contours of a peace agreement, including the timing of a ceasefires. Russia says that it is currently preparing its version of the memorandum and cannot estimate how long that will take.
KYIV and European governments have accused Moscow of blocking while his troops are improving in Eastern Ukraine.
“Putin is ready to make peace, but not at any price,” said a senior Russian source with knowledge of Kremlin thinking at the top level, which spoke on condition of anonymity.
The three Russian sources said that Putin wants a 'written' promise of great Western powers not to increase the NATO alliance led by the US for the formal exclusion of membership of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldavia and other former Soviet republics.
Russia also wants Ukraine to be neutral, some Western sanctions are canceled, a solution of the issue of frozen Russian sovereign assets in the West and protection for Russian speakers in Ukraine, said the three sources.
The first source said that if Putin realizes that he is unable to reach a peace agreement on his own conditions, he will try to show the Ukrainians and Europeans by military victories that “peace will be even more painful tomorrow.”
The Kremlin did not respond to a request for comments on Reuters report. Putin and Russian officials have repeatedly said that every peace agreement must tackle the “main causes” of the conflict – Russian Steno for the issue of NATO extension and Western support for Ukraine.
KYIV has repeatedly said that Russia should not get a veto power about his ambitions to become a member of NATO alliance. Ukraine says it needs the West to give it a strong security guarantee with teeth to deter any future Russian attack.
The administration of President Volodyymyr Zenskyy did not respond to a request for comments.
NATO has also said in the past that it will not change its “open door” policy, just because Moscow demands it. A spokesperson for the 32-person Alliance did not respond to questions from Reuters.
Putin ordered tens of thousands of troops in Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine in between Russian -supported separatists and Ukrainian troops.
Russia currently checks slightly less than one fifth in the country. Although the Russian advances have been accelerated in the past year, the war costs both Russia and Ukraine a lot in terms of victims and military editions.
Reuters reported in January that Putin had grown due to the economic disruptions in the Russian war economy, in the midst of labor shortages and high interest rates imposed to curb inflation. The oil price, the foundation of the Russian economy, has fallen steadily this year.
Russian President Vladimir Putin lives on 27 May 2025 at a meeting of the Russia Land of Opportunity Supervisory Board in the Kremlin in Moscow. Alexander Kazakov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP
Trump, who is proud to have friendly relationships with Putin and has expressed his conviction that the Russian leader wants peace, has warned that Washington could impose further sanctions if Moscow delays the efforts to find a settlement. On Sunday, Trump suggests on social media that Putin had 'absolutely crazy' by unleashing a huge air raid on Ukraine last week.
The first source said that if Putin saw a tactical chance of the battlefield, he would push further into Ukraine – and that the Kremlin believed that Russia could fight for years, regardless of which sanctions and economic pain were imposed by the West.
A second source said that Putin was now less inclined to make a compromise on territory and kept up to his public position that he wanted the entire four regions in Oost -Ukraine through Russia.
“Putin has hardened his position,” said the second source about the issue of territory.
NATO expansion
If Trump and Putin Joust publicly about the prospects for peace in Ukraine, Reuters could not determine whether the intensification of the war and the difficulty of positions is re -relieving determination to reach a deal or the collapse of conversations.
In June last year, Putin postponed his opening conditions for an immediate end of the war: Ukraine must drop his NATO ambitions and withdraw all his troops from the whole of the territory of four Ukrainian regions claimed and mostly controlled by Russia.
In addition to the Crimea, who annexed it in 2014, Russia currently checks almost all Luhansk, more than 70% of Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson. It also covers a piece of the Kharkiv and Sumy regions and threatens Dnipropetrovsk.
Former US President Joe Biden, Western European leaders and Ukraine cast the invasion like an imperial style and have repeatedly blamed for sworn Russian troops.
Putin casts the war as a turning point in the Moscow relations with the West that he says the Russia humiliated after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 by increasing NATO and penetrating what he regards as the influence of Moscow.
At the Bucharest -top of 2008, NATO leaders agreed that Ukraine and Georgia would someday become a member. Ukraine changed its constitution in 2019 that is committed to the path of full membership of NATO and the European Union.
Trump has said that earlier American support for NATO membership bid of Ukraine was a cause of the war and has indicated that Ukraine will not receive membership. The US Department of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comments for this story.
Putin, who rose to the top Kremlin -Baan in 1999, has repeatedly returned to the NATO extension issue, also in his most detailed comments about a possible peace in 2024.
In 2021, just two months before the Russian invasion, Moscow proposed a draft agreement with NATO members who would bind NATO on the basis of Article 6 to “refrain from expanding NATO, including the accession of Ukraine and other states.” The American and NATO diplomats said at the time that Russia could not have a veto about the expansion of the Alliance.
Russia wants a promise on NATO in writing because Putin thinks Moscow was misled by the United States after the fall of 1989 of the Berlin Wall when the American State Secretary James Baker Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ensured that the NATO would not expand eastwards, said two of the sources.
There was such a verbal promise, said former director of the Central Intelligence Agency Director William J. Burns in his memoirs, but it was never formalized – and it was made at a time when the collapse of the Soviet Union had not taken place.
NATO, founded in 1949 to provide safety against the Soviet Union, says that it is not a challenge for Russia -although the assessment of peace and security in 2022 in the Euro -Atlantic area identified Russia as the most “significant and direct threat”.
The invasion of Russia in Ukraine that year was asked at NATO in 2023, followed by Sweden in 2024.
Western European leaders have repeatedly said that if Russia wins the Ukraine war, this one day could attack NATO itself -a step that would cause a world war. Russia rejects claims as unfounded scars, but has also warned that the war in Ukraine can escalate in a broader conflict.
(Reporting by Reuters in Moscow; Edit by Daniel Flynn)
