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Zelensky said he would ask US President Donald Trump to supply weapons and sanction Russia if Moscow broke the deals
Published : 26 Mar 2025, 09:10 AM
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said a truce with Russia covering the Black Sea and energy strikes was effective immediately on Tuesday, but warned that Moscow was already manipulating and distorting the accords.
He said he would ask US President Donald Trump to supply weapons and sanction Russia if Moscow broke the deals.
The United States said earlier it had made separate agreements with Kyiv and Moscow to ensure safe navigation in the Black Sea and to implement a ban on attacks on energy facilities in the two countries.
"The US side considers that our agreements come into force after their announcement by the US side," Zelensky told reporters at a news conference in Kyiv, adding that he did not trust Russia to honour the arrangements.
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, in fact, 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-km (600-mile) front line.
'NO FAITH'
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.
Nightly Russian drone attacks have been a feature of life in big Ukrainian cities for months. So have power outages as missiles hammered the power grid. Kyiv has used drones to hit Russian oil refineries to raise the costs for its larger foe.
Ukraine, Zelensky said, presented US officials during talks with a list of facilities that should be covered by the moratorium on energy strikes.
The Kremlin issued a list of Russian and Ukrainian facilities subject to the moratorium on strikes, including oil refineries, oil and gas pipelines and nuclear power plants.
The deals were announced following two days of talks in Saudi Arabia between US and Ukrainian officials on the one hand and US and Russian officials on the other.
The White House said in a joint statement with Russia that it would help Moscow restore its access to the world market for agricultural and fertiliser exports.
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.
Kyiv will regard any movement of Russian naval vessels beyond the east of the Black Sea as a violation of the spirit of the agreements, said Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov on X.
In such an event, Kyiv will have the right to self-defence, he said, implying that Ukraine could retaliate.
Kyiv, which has used naval drones and missiles to push Russia's fleet back towards the east of the Black Sea, would welcome third countries supporting the implementation of the accords, Umerov said.
"The American side really 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 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.
