The Kremlin has said that someone would have to force Volodymyr Zelenskyy to make peace and that the Ukrainian leader's public clash with United States President Donald Trump had shown just how hard it would be to find a way to end the war.
"What happened at the White House on Friday, of course, demonstrated how difficult it will be to reach a settlement trajectory around Ukraine," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
“The Kiev regime and Zelenskyy do not want peace. They want the war to continue."
On Friday, Trump and Vice President JD Vance clashed with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office.
Trump accused Zelenskyy of disrespecting the United States, said he was losing the war and risked triggering World War 3.
"It is very important that someone forces Zelenskyy himself to change his position," Peskov said.
"Someone has to make Zelenskyy want peace. If the Europeans can do it, they should be honoured and praised."
Russian President Vladimir Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in 2022, triggering the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the depths of the Cold War.
Conflict in and over Ukraine had been building for years before his decision. Russia occupied Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in 2014 after a pro-Moscow president was ousted amid mass street protests in Kiev.
Russian-backed separatists then began fighting Ukraine's armed forces in the country's eastern Donbass region.
Peskov said Putin was familiar with the "unprecedented event" in the Oval Office, adding that it had demonstrated at the very least Zelenskyy's lack of diplomatic skills to salvage his relationship with Trump but that Ukraine would not concede any territory to Russia as part of a peace deal.
Russia currently controls just under a fifth of Ukraine - or about 113,000 square kilometres - while Ukraine has seized about 450 square km of Russia in an incursion into neighbouring Kursk province, according to open source maps of the war and Russian estimates.
TRT Global - UN top rights official Volker Turk urges that Ukraine be part of any peace deal as US-Russia negotiations progress and highlights a 30 percent rise in civilian casualties.
Western 'fragmentation'
After the clash in the Oval Office, European leaders reaffirmed support for Zelenskyy.
At a summit in London on Sunday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said they had agreed to draw up a Ukraine peace plan to present to the United States.
Starmer also announced a new $2 billion (1.6 billion pounds) deal that would allow Ukraine to purchase 5,000 air-defence missiles.
Responding to the summit, the Kremlin claimed the London summit was an attempt to continue the war, but also noted the divisions between Europe and the US.
"We see that... a fragmentation of the collective West has begun," Peskov said.
"There remains a group of countries that rather constitutes the party of war, which declares its readiness to further back Ukraine in terms of supporting the war and ensuring the continuation of hostilities."
Several Western allies and Ukraine view Russia's 2022 military campaign as an imperial-style land grab, though some European nations have taken a more cautious stance.
Putin casts the conflict as part of an existential battle with a declining and decadent West which he says humiliated Russia after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 by enlarging the NATO military alliance and encroaching on what he considers Moscow's sphere of influence, including Ukraine.
Peskov said Russia would continue its dialogue with Washington on bilateral ties and would press on with what Moscow calls its "special military operation" in Ukraine.
Asked about Trump's remarks that he had spoken to Putin on "numerous occasions", Peskov said: "There have been no contacts that should have been made public" beyond a Feb.
TRT Global - Zelenskyy had travelled to Washington to sign a US-Ukrainian deal for the joint exploitation of Ukraine's vast mineral resources, as part of a post-war recovery in a US-brokered peace deal.
