Washington, Moscow and Europe have all produced conflicting ceasefire proposals this month, with two of the proposals appearing in the past week.

The administration of US President Donald Trump presented Ukraine with its proposal on April 17, saying it was “ the final offer from the United States to both sides”.

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Ukraine countered with its own proposal on April 23, which was backed by European officials, but US Secretary of State Marco Rubio allegedly pulled out of a meeting to discuss it.

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a three-day, unilateral ceasefire on Monday, in honour of Victory Day on May 9, commemorating Russia’s role in defeating Nazi Germany in World War II.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed Putin’s proposal as “another attempt at manipulation”, saying, “For some reason, everyone is supposed to wait until May 8 before ceasing fire – just to provide Putin with silence for his parade.”

Trump seemed to press hardest on Kyiv for a quick and permanent end to hostilities, but his proposal, revealed by Reuters, made significant concessions opposed by the Europeans.

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Trump recognised Russian legal ownership of Crimea, and de facto ownership of the four provinces it has partially conquered – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson.

Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula in January 2014, before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. European Union external affairs chief Kaja Kallas has said Europe will not recognise violent annexations of land, in line with the UN Charter.

Divisions over sanctions, weapons and NATO membership

Trump’s plan also offered Ukraine no US security guarantees after the war, leaving those to “an ad hoc grouping of European states plus willing non-European states”.

The Ukrainian-European counter-proposal suggested leaving all territorial negotiations until after a ceasefire, and said the US should be included in the guarantor states.

There were other areas of disagreement.

The US conceded to Russian demands that Ukraine should never enter NATO, and Western sanctions against Russia should be lifted immediately.

The European-Ukrainian counterproposal said sanctions “may be subject to gradual easing after a sustainable peace is achieved and subject to resumption in the event of a breach of the peace agreement”.

It also stipulated that there would be “no restrictions on the Ukrainian Defence Forces” and “no restrictions on the presence, weapons and operations of friendly foreign forces on the territory of Ukraine”.

Russian officials have repeatedly rejected both these ideas, saying it will never accept European – and therefore NATO – forces on Ukrainian soil, and that Ukraine must reduce its own military to a token force.

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The EU’s outlook is fundamentally different from the Trump administration’s.

“If you want the killing to stop, you should put the pressure on Russia, who actually does the killing,” Kaja Kallas, vice president of the European Commission, told journalists on April 16.

In contrast, Trump stopped all military cooperation with Ukraine during the first week of March to press Kyiv to seek peace. It was during this week that Russian forces pushed Ukrainian troops out of most of the land they occupied in Russia’s Kursk region.

Ukraine’s defence and foreign ministers failed to meet with their British and French counterparts when they presented their peace plan in London on April 23, apparently because the US’s Rubio pulled out of the meeting, according to The Washington Post.

Russia attacks Kyiv

Putin launched a massive attack on Kyiv the day after the proposal was made, killing 12 civilians and wounding dozens.

“While claiming to seek peace, Russia launched a deadly air attack on Kyiv. This isn’t a pursuit of peace, it’s a mockery of it. The real obstacle is not Ukraine, but Russia, whose war aims have not changed,” declared Kallas.

“I am not happy with the Russian strikes on Kyiv. Not necessary, and very bad timing,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, in a rare display of impatience with Putin.

Two days later, after meeting with Zelenskyy on the sidelines of Pope Francis’s funeral in Rome, he threatened Putin with sanctions.

“There was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days,” he wrote. “It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently, through ‘Banking’ or ‘Secondary Sanctions?’”

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“Meetings in the Vatican and Rome confirmed that our partners understand what is happening,” Zelenskyy said, referring to what he said was Russian deception.

Putin’s forces, meanwhile, claimed to have completely ejected Ukraine from Kursk on Saturday, creating “conditions for further successful actions of the Russian Armed Forces”.

Russian and North Korean officials extolled the military assistance North Korean forces offered in Kursk, something they had denied since that assistance began in November.

Valery Gerasimov, Russian head of the military staff, on Saturday said North Korea had provided “significant assistance”.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Monday praised last year’s Russian-North Korean strategic cooperation agreement as having performed very effectively, and said Russia was willing to reciprocate the military assistance whenever necessary.

North Korea’s Central Military Commission also officially admitted the cooperation for the first time on Monday, quoting leader Kim Jong Un saying the Kursk operation was a “sacred mission to further strengthen the strong friendship and solidarity”, between Russia and North Korea.

If anything, Russian actions and statements suggested Moscow was asserting itself along its border with the European Union and NATO.

“In the past year, the military forces of NATO countries deployed near Russia’s western borders have increased nearly 2.5 times,” former Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told the state-run Russian news agency TASS in an interview last week, complaining about the rearmament of Poland and the Baltic states in particular.

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The Wall Street Journal reported Russia was expanding its forces along the border with Finland and stockpiling new tanks, citing Western military and intelligence officials.