Trump will talk to Putin today

NEW YORK, Mar 17 (Reuters): US President Donald Trump said he plans to speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday and discuss ending the war in Ukraine, after positive talks between US and Russian officials in Moscow.

"We want to see if we can bring that war to an end," Trump told reporters on Air Force One during a late flight back to the Washington area from Florida. "Maybe we can, maybe we can't, but I think we have a very good chance.

"I'll be speaking to President Putin on Tuesday. A lot of work's been done over the weekend."

Trump is trying to win Putin's support for a 30-day ceasefire proposal that Ukraine accepted last week, as both sides continued trading heavy aerial strikes through the weekend and Russia moved closer to ejecting Ukrainian forces from their months-old foothold in the western Russian region of Kursk.

The Kremlin said on Friday that Putin had sent Trump a message about his ceasefire plan via US envoy Steve Witkoff, who held talks in Moscow, expressing "cautious optimism" that a deal could be reached to end the three-year conflict.

In separate appearances on Sunday TV shows in the United States, Witkoff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump's national security adviser, Mike Waltz, emphasised that there were still challenges to be worked out before Russia agrees to a ceasefire, much less a final peaceful resolution to the war.

Asked on ABC whether the US would accept a peace deal in which Russia was allowed to keep stretches of eastern Ukraine that it has seized, Waltz replied, "Are we going to drive every Russian off of every inch of Ukrainian soil?" He added that the negotiations had to be grounded in "reality."

Rubio told CBS a final peace deal would "involve a lot of hard work, concessions from both Russia and Ukraine," and that it would be difficult to even begin those negotiations "as long as they're shooting at each other."

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday that he saw a good chance to end the Russian war after Kyiv accepted the US proposal for a 30-day interim ceasefire.

However, Zelensky has consistently said that the sovereignty of his country is not negotiable and that Russia must surrender the territory it has seized. Russia seized the Crimea peninsula in 2014 and now controls most of four eastern Ukrainian regions since it invaded the country in 2022.

Russia will seek "ironclad" guarantees in any peace deal that NATO nations exclude Kyiv from membership and that Ukraine will remain neutral, a Russian deputy foreign minister said in remarks published on Monday.

In a broad-ranging interview with the Russian media outlet Izvestia that made no reference to the ceasefire proposal, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said that any long-lasting peace treaty on Ukraine must meet Moscow's demands.

"We will demand that ironclad security guarantees become part of this agreement," Izvestia cited Grushko as saying. "Part of these guarantees should be the neutral status of Ukraine, the refusal of NATO countries to accept it into the alliance."