Russia presents US with demands for possible Ukraine peace deal, Reuters reports

According to Reuters on March 13, citing two unidentified sources, Russia has provided the United States with a list of demands for a potential deal to end the war against Ukraine and reset relations with Washington. According to the sources, Russian and U.S. officials discussed these demands during face-to-face and virtual conversations over the past three weeks. It is believed that Russia's previous commitments to Ukraine, the United States, and NATO are broadly mirrored in these conditions. The exact content of the list remains unclear, however, as does the issue of whether Russia is willing to engage in peace talks with Kyiv before these conditions are met.

Russia's previously voiced conditions have included Ukraine permanently abandoning NATO aspirations, prohibiting foreign troop deployments on Ukrainian soil, and recognizing Crimea and four partially occupied regions — the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts — as Russian territory.

As a precondition for negotiations, Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted in June 2024 that Ukraine withdraw from those four regions. On March 12, President Volodymyr Zelensky stated once more that in any subsequent peace agreement, Ukraine would not recognize any occupied territories as belonging to Russia. Despite American Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has refuted President Donald Trump's claim on February 24 that Putin would permit European peacekeepers in Ukraine as part of a deal. Additionally, Russia has maintained its long-standing demand that NATO and the United States address what it refers to as the "root causes" of the war, which include the alliance's expansion to the east. Ukraine officially submitted its application to NATO in September 2022. At the NATO summit in Washington in 2024, NATO members pledged that Ukraine's path to membership is "irreversible," but the Trump administration has ruled out the accession in the near future. Trump is waiting to hear from Putin on whether Russia will agree to a 30-day ceasefire that Ukraine has already accepted on the condition that Moscow does as well. Ukraine agreed to the proposal for the temporary truce during talks in Jeddah on March 11, after which Washington resumed military and intelligence support.

It is still unclear how Putin will respond to the ceasefire proposal. According to Reuters, some U.S. officials and analysts are concerned that Moscow will use the brief pause to exacerbate tensions between Washington, Kiev, and their European allies while preparing for subsequent offensives. The Washington Post reported on a document drafted by a Moscow think tank close to the Federal Security Service (FSB) that lays out Russia's potential maximalist demands for ending the war.

These include a demilitarized zone in the south of Ukraine and a buffer zone in the northeast of Ukraine near the borders of the oblasts of Bryansk and Belgorod. The document, drafted in February, further calls for "the complete dismantling" of Ukraine's current government and says that peace is unlikely before 2026. It is unclear what — if any — role this document plays in the Kremlin's decision-making.

On March 10, Western security officials told Bloomberg that Putin has set "maximalist" demands for territorial concessions, peacekeepers, and Ukraine's neutrality because he knows they will likely be rejected by Kiev and European nations.