Peloni: A one month ceasefire? Just as Kursk is collapsing? There would seem to be little to entice Russia to accept this offer, particularly following the Ukrainian attack on Moscow. We will see how Putin will respond, but it does not seem likely that he would accept this ceasefire offer without some significant advantage offered to them to entice them to accept the one month pause.
Prospects for a successful outcome are minimal
Stephen Bryen | Weapons & Strategy | Mar 11, 2025
President Volodymyr Zelensky and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on March 11, 2025. (Presidential Office)
Maybe, or maybe not, will Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special negotiator, travel to Moscow, allegedly to brief Russian president Vladimir Putin. Right now Witkoff is in Riyadh with the rest of the US delegation in talks with the Ukrainians.
The Russians have not confirmed any Witkoff visit.
Those talks are supposed to take Ukraine’s temperature on President Trump’s peace initiative. The administration has been saying that any deal will require concessions from both sides, but Ukraine will have to give up territory.
What makes the Riyadh discussions (I choose to not call the meeting a negotiation) bizarre, is that Vladimir Zelensky did not attend the talks.
Zelensky is in Riyadh. He met with Saudi Arabia’s real leader, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Sultan. What they talked about is anyone’s guess. Apparently he stayed on after that meeting, and may be across the hall from where the meeting took place.
It is fair to ask how come Zelensky is not at the meeting and how come he is hanging around. The delegation in the meeting could, of course, consult with him during the breaks, and Zelensky could give instructions.
The Duran says that Washington did not want Zelensky at the Riyadh meeting. This is quite doubtful.
According to the latest from Riyadh, Ukraine says it is ready for a 30 day cease fire. If this is what Washington “extracted” from the Ukrainians, it is operationally meaningless. With Russia on the brink of winning in Kursk and elsewhere, the Russians won’t accept any such deal. If it is a ruse to allow the US to resume arms shipments to Ukraine, knowing Russia will reject it, the so-called peace initiative is a dead letter.
[After this was published, Washington announced it was resuming arms sales to Ukraine. The rest is history.]
On the early morning before the Riyadh meeting, Ukraine launched a massive drone attack on Russia, with Moscow and the Moscow region (along the drone approaches) hit hard. The Ukrainians used domestically produced Palianytsia which carries a 50 kg warhead and can fly 600km at about 800 kph. It is claimed that Palianytsia can operate without needing a man in the loop (meaning now real time communications), but this seems unlikely as video of take downs of Ukrainian drones using jammers have appeared online.
Altogether 337 drones were shot down, according to Moscow, by a combination of Russian air defenses and jammers. The Russians did not report how many drones were launched by the Ukrainians or how many got through and hit their targets. Complicating matters is that a drone that is hit may still fall and destroy property or kill or wound people.
Of the 337 shot down, here is an accounting, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense:
91 UAVs – over the territory of the Moscow region,
126 UAVs – over the territory of the Kursk region,
38 UAVs – over the territory of the Bryansk region,
25 UAVs – over the territory of the Belgorod region,
22 UAVs – over the territory of the Ryazan region,
10 UAVs – over the territory of the Kaluga region,
8 UAVs – over the territory of the Lipetsk region,
8 UAVs – over the territory of the Oryol region,
6 UAVs – over the territory of the Voronezh region,
3 UAVs – over the territory of the Nizhny Novgorod region.
Most of the targets appear to have been apartment blocks, some rail lines, at least one fuel storage facility, and others not yet reported. The number of killed and wounded also is not yet available.
It was provocative for Kiev to launch these attacks, although they had justification in that the strikes could be called retaliatory, at the moment of the meeting in Riyadh. The decision to do so appears to have been taken because Ukraine is close to being solidly defeated in Kursk and is trying to cover up that defeat by deflecting attention from it.
Given the decision to go ahead at the very moment of the discussions in Riyadh also served as a sort of warning to Washington. Ukraine’s real mantra is to keep fighting no matter what the cost.
This explains why it is unlikely in the extreme that there will be a peace process, no matter how much Washington wants one, or says it does.
Quite possibly, the outcome of the war will be on the battlefield, not otherwise.
This leaves Washington and Europe with no real exit. Europe knows that if it tries to save Ukraine with Euro/NATO troops, a general war will start and the Russians will attack NATO’s installations and try and punish those states backing such a mission, namely the UK, France and maybe Germany. In such a case, as President Trump has made clear, the US will not come to the rescue, at least not right away.
There is one interesting development that suggests there may be a way to enforce a deal. The new head of the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe, Secretary General Feridun Sinirlioglu visited Moscow the day before the attack, and was shown the results of the drone attack by the Russians. Relations between the OSCE and Russia have been very bad for a number of years. Apparently Sinirlioglu wants to change that. Sergey Lavrov, who met with Sinirlioglu in Moscow, was upbeat on the potential for change. What does this have to do with peace in Ukraine? OSCE was the security overseer of the Minsk Accords in 2014 and 2015. Could Moscow be thinking about a return engagement either with a sanctioned peace deal, or some arrangement in future if Russia wins the war? Time will tell.
A key point is that the presence of OSCE (where Russia has a veto) obviates the need for any other peacekeepers, European, NATO or otherwise. This may be at least one plan Moscow has in its back pocket.
@Adam
Clearly, “Jake’s” assertions, which were nonsensical to begin with, are completely false, likely done in an attempt to try to save face for Zel after being omitted from the successful negotiation which should have been accomplished after Zel’s outrageous performance at the Oval office.
Indeed, Zelensky released a statement today detailing that
Hence, Zel was not present at the negotiations, as correctly indicated by Bryen.
Likely, Zel’s presence was anticipated to be too toxic and therefore too much of a distraction, based on his earlier performance, which was why the Americans met without Zel being present. This may portend the manner in which Trump deals with Urkaine in the future, ie without providing Zel with a world stage on which to obstruct Trump’s efforts to end this war.
This is from the Jake Broe site (pro-Ukraine)
This from the Jake Broe site (pro-Ukraine):
Premiered 5 hours ago #ukraine #russia #nato
Ukraine has agreed with The United States on offering a 30 day interim ceasefire to Russia. It is now Russia’s choice whether to accept and honor a 30 ceasefire on the battlefield in Ukraine. Trump officials are now claiming that all military aid to Ukraine and intelligence sharing has resumed effective immediately.
:
So many web sites are reporting this that I have to assume there is some truth in it.
“Jake” claims that Zelensky actually was present in the conference room when a photo of the conference attendees were taken, but chose to “hide” in a spot where the camera would not show him as present. This is a different explanation than that of Stephen Bryan, who believes that Zelensky was not present at the conference. “Jake” was unable to explain why Zelensky chose to :hide: from the cameras,even though he was somewhere in the conference room. But he speculates that he did not want to annot Donald Trump by revealing his presence, because Trump is known to personally diislike Zelensky.
The Ukrainians say their targets are oil storage facilities, oil refineries, airfields, and weapons storage facilities. They claim that they have managed to score “hits” on these targets. In particular, they claim to have knocked out of commission several Russian oil refineries, and are optimistic that this will make it difficult for Russia to have the refined petroleum products need to operate their planes, tanks, armored vehicles, etc. They also claim to have destroyed many Russian military vehicles that are participating on the front lines, and many infantry units. They even claim that Russian infantrymen have become very afraid of their (Ukrainian) drone attacks. They have published some videos that they say Russian soldiers recorded on their cell phones which they say prove that Russian soldiers have become fearful of Ukrainian drone attacks. However, they do not claim that the Russian troops have been deterred from fighting for Mother Russia by these attacks.
From today’s Guardian:
Suddenly the ball is in Russia’s court. The flow of US intelligence and military aid to Ukraine is to resume – and the Kremlin is being asked to agree to a 30-day ceasefire that Kyiv has already told the Americans it will sign up to.
It is a dizzying turnaround from the Oval Office row between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump and the apparent abandonment of the White House’s strategy to simply pressurise Ukraine into agreeing to a peace deal. Now, for the first time, Russia is being asked to make a commitment, though it is unclear what will follow if it does sign up.
Related: Ukraine agrees to 30-day ceasefire as US prepares to lift military aid restrictions
Announcing the peace proposal in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said that he hoped Russia would accept a peace agreement “so we can get to the second phase of this, which is real negotiations”.
That may leave plenty of room for interpretation. Russia has also been pushing for a ceasefire, though the Kremlin had wanted that to be followed by elections in Ukraine, before any full negotiation about territory and Kyiv’s future security.
Ukraine, meanwhile, will want strong security guarantees to avoid a resumption of the war, involving European peacekeepers on the ground, which Russia has so far said it is against. An open question, perhaps, is whether peacekeepers could enter Ukraine during a ceasefire period, but this is speculative.