Trump's envoy travels to Moscow to convince Putin of a ceasefire
Russian President accelerates assault to recapture Kursk province before negotiations
BarcelonaDonald Trump's special envoy for the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, Steve Witkoff, is already traveling to Moscow, where he plans to meet this Thursday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, to obtain his approval for the thirty-day ceasefire proposal agreed with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has already warned that the ball is now "in Putin's court."
US President Donald Trump explained yesterday that a US delegation was traveling to Russia. "We hope to get a ceasefire from Russia. If we get that, I think that will be 80% of the way to ending this horrible bloodbath," he said. Trump could even consider pressuring Moscow with sanctions to get it to accept the ceasefire. However, he stressed that he hopes "that won't be necessary," but did not rule out imposing measures "that would not be pleasant in a financial sense," a scenario that, he says, would be "very bad for Russia."
The Kremlin has said that Putin is studying the proposal., agreed upon by the American and Ukrainian delegations in Jidda (Saudi Arabia), and that it is also possible that Putin and Trump spoke by phone. Putin has so far maintained a strategic silence on the proposal, which it is not known if he will break today at the press conference he is scheduled to hold with the Belarusian autocrat, Aleksandr Lukashenko, in Moscow.
This will be the second time that Putin meets with Trump's envoy, since on February 11 they met for an hour and a half to obtain the release of an American prisoner, according to The Moscow Times.
Russia says it has recaptured 86% of the territory occupied in Kursk
The negotiations come just as Putin is taking advantage of the halt in US military and intelligence aid in Kiev to increase military pressure on Russia's Kursk region and recapture as much territory as possible from Ukraine. That same Wednesday, Putin visited Kursk to oversee these military efforts. According to sources in Moscow, Russia has already recaptured 86% of the territory occupied by Ukraine since August of last year, when it launched an operation to invade Russian territory. Zelensky was seeking an additional bargaining chip to negotiate a lasting peace agreement with Russia.
"I am confident that all the missions awaiting our combat units will be unconditionally completed and that the territory of the Kursk region will be completely liberated from the enemy in the near future," Putin said during his visit to the headquarters of the Russian troops' command in Kursk. The task of the Russian troops now is to destroy the enemy still entrenched in Kursk "as quickly as possible," he said. It was Putin's first visit to the region bordering Ukraine since the start of the war.
Russian Army Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov explained during the visit that in the last five days Russian troops have recaptured "24 settlements and 259 square kilometers of territory in the Kursk region." "In total, during the offensive operations the Russian army has liberated more than 1,100 square kilometers of territory, which represents more than 86 percent of the area previously occupied" by Ukraine, Gerasimov said, adding that Kiev had lost 67,000 men on this war front, a figure that Kyiv...
