Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said a truce with Russia covering the Black Sea and energy strikes was effective immediately on Tuesday but claimed that Moscow was already manipulating and distorting the accords.
He said he would ask United States President Donald Trump to supply weapons and sanction Russia if Moscow broke the deals.
The Ukrainian president, speaking later in his nightly video address, said Russia was already deceiving the world.
“Unfortunately, even now, even today, on the very day of negotiations, we see how the Russians have already begun to manipulate,” Zelensky said.
“They are already trying to distort agreements and deceive both our intermediaries and the entire world.”
He said the Kremlin was lying when it said accords on Black Sea shipping were linked to sanctions imposed on Moscow. Ukraine, he said, would do everything to implement the accords, but Russia had to understand that it would “receive a strong response” if it launched strikes.
The accords are the first aimed at halting energy strikes since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, triggering Europe’s biggest conflict since World War Two. The fighting rages on across a 1,000-kilometre (600-mile) front line.
In his comments to reporters, the Ukrainian leader said the agreements set out no course of action if Russia broke them and that he would appeal to Trump if that happened.
“We have no faith in the Russians, but we will be constructive,” he said.
He said US officials saw the energy ceasefire as covering attacks on other civilian infrastructure too and that ports should be covered by the Black Sea agreement.
Ukraine, Zelensky said, presented US officials during talks with a list of facilities that should be covered by the moratorium on energy strikes.
Zelensky said Ukraine had not agreed to put that in its statement with the US side.
“We believe that this is a weakening of position and sanctions,” he said.
“The American side wanted all of this not to fail, so they did not want to go into many details. But in any case, we will have to understand answers to each of the details,” Zelensky said.
Zelensky said Turkey could potentially be involved in monitoring in the Black Sea while Middle Eastern countries could track the energy truce, though he noted that had not been discussed yet with those countries.
Separately, Zelensky said the United States had presented Ukraine with an expanded version of a bilateral minerals deal that went beyond the initial framework agreement that the two sides agreed on earlier but never signed following an acrimonious Oval Office meeting last month.
Zelensky said he had not been able to fully review the new proposal in detail yet, but that it did not include greater US involvement in Ukraine’s nuclear power sector, something that has been floated by Washington in recent days.
