- Ukraine has "expressed readiness" to accept a US proposal for a 30-day cease-fire with Russia.
- The US will resume the flow of arms and intelligence to Ukraine.
- The next challenge for the Trump administration will be getting Russia to agree.
KYIV, Ukraine — Kyiv is open to a cease-fire with Moscow, but that's only half of the equation. The Trump administration has to get Russia to stop attacking Ukraine.
Ukraine signaled that it is ready to accept a US proposal for an immediate 30-day ceasefire with Russia, Kyiv and Washington said in a joint statement Tuesday. It creates a new opening in the effort to end the brutal three-year war. The US said it will immediately resume military aid shipments and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, according to the joint statement from both delegations.
The next step — getting Russian President Vladimir Putin to cease his missile barrages and assaults on Ukraine — may prove particularly tricky.
Ukraine is continuing to see Russian attacks. "Russia is not stopping its attacks; it continues missile strikes on civilians and critical infrastructure," Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential advisor, told Business Insider last week amid the pause in US support. "Russia is not stopping and will not stop."
Russia has relentlessly attacked Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, with missiles and drones throughout the conflict. Last week, President Donald Trump threatened Moscow with sanctions and tariffs if it didn't reach a cease-fire, but the strikes have continued even after the direct talks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in February.
Russia attacked Ukraine overnight last Thursday with 67 missiles and nearly 200 drones, one of its largest strikes of the entire war.
At that time, Dara Massicot, an expert on the Russian military with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Russia and Eurasia Program, said on X that any potential carrots offered to the Russians in Riyadh "were not enough to cause the Kremlin to pause ops."
She added that Moscow doesn't care if it embarrasses the US.
War experts have seen few signs that Moscow is ready to end its war in Ukraine. Conflict analysts at the Institute for the Study of War think tank in Washington noted last week that Putin and his foreign ministry rejected the possibility of a negotiated cease-fire.
"We'll take this offer now to the Russians, and we hope that they'll say yes, that they'll say yes to peace," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday. "The ball is now in their court."
Russian officials recently leveled demands likely to be non-starters with Ukraine: the surrender of more territory Russia does not control, tight caps that would shrink Ukraine's military to a fraction of its current size, and no European troops to monitor that Ukraine to keep the peace.
Ukrainians and their international partners worry that Russia will use a cease-fire to rebuild its battered forces and re-invade Ukraine in the coming years in an echo of the 2015 deal that failed to end Russia's territorial aggression in eastern Ukraine.
The biggest factor that brought about Ukraine's change on cease-fire talks was Trump's willingness to publicly break with Ukraine and temporarily starve its longtime partner of much-needed military support while also pushing for huge concessions to Ukraine's natural resources.
After a contentious White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy toward the end of February, the Trump administration shut down the flow of security assistance to Ukraine last week and immediately followed that move by cutting intelligence sharing with Kyiv and limiting access to crucial satellite imagery.
In that meeting, Zelenskyy noted past failures and expressed concerns that Putin would not adhere to a cease-fire deal. Trump, however, said last week that he believed Putin would actually want to end the war.
Tuesday's announcement comes shortly after US and Ukrainian delegations met in Saudi Arabia for high-stakes peace talks.
Diplomats agreed to "immediately begin negotiations toward an enduring peace that provides for Ukraine's long-term security," the statement said.
The US will next discuss the specifics with Russia. Ukraine emphasized the need to involve European partners in the peace process; Trump has so far resisted providing any security guarantees to Ukraine as part of a cease-fire deal, saying that will be Europe's problem to figure out.
The Tuesday statement said the US and Ukraine were also close to signing a rare earth minerals agreement that the two countries were slated to sign last month.
