US President Donald Trump attends the National Day of Prayer Event in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 01 May 2025. Photo: EPA-EFE/WILL OLIVER
The US will no longer mediate peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce announced on Thursday, calling on officials from Moscow and Kyiv to meet directly to finalise a deal.
While Washington remained “committed” to achieving peace in Ukraine, US officials would no longer “fly around the world at the drop of a hat to mediate meetings”, Bruce stressed.
“It is now between the two parties”, Bruce said. “Now is the time that they need to present and develop concrete ideas about how this conflict is going to end. It’s going to be up to them”.
Bruce’s comments echoed recent remarks from US President Donald Trump, who said last week that Moscow and Kyiv were “very close” to a ceasefire deal and should now meet “at very high levels to ‘finish it off’”.
Other members of the Trump administration, however, struck a less optimistic tone about the prospect of an end to hostilities in the near future on Thursday.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News that, while now closer than before, Russia and Ukraine’s positions on how a settlement to end the war should look were still “far apart” and that it would take a “real breakthrough” to make peace possible.
In a separate interview with the network, US Vice President J.D. Vance said he did not foresee an end to the war coming “any time soon”.
Washington would continue to help Moscow and Kyiv find “middle ground” in their positions, but it would now be “up to the Russians and Ukrainians now that each side knows what the other’s terms for peace are”, Vance said. “It’s going to be up to them to come to an agreement and stop this brutal, brutal conflict”.
The Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to walk away from the peace process should a breakthrough not be made soon, with frustration growing in the White House at the lack of progress in bringing about a ceasefire.
Just a day after his claim that the two sides were on the cusp of a deal, Trump wrote on Truth Social on Saturday that continued Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities had made him “think that maybe [Vladimir Putin] doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along”.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Putin’s insistence that Russia be granted full control over the four regions of eastern Ukraine it currently only partially occupies as part of any peace deal was stalling negotiations to end the war.
However, there are hopes in Kyiv that the signing on Wednesday of a long-awaited minerals agreement between the US and Ukraine will strengthen Ukraine’s hand in negotiations, with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying the deal signalled to Russia that the US was committed to a “peace process centred on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term”.
