A message was provided to U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoy Gen. (ret.) Keith Kellogg, when he met in Belarus on June 21 with President Aleksandr Lukashenko, that negotiations over the hostilities in Ukraine could proceed by pulling back the escalatory step (from last year) of bombing Russian cities with Western weapons. This differs from the U.K.-France-German position of the “Coalition of the Willing,” that the first step should be a 30-day ceasefire.
According to his account yesterday, he had told Kellogg that Putin wants, as a first step, an end to Kiev striking Russian cities with drones and the West’s cruise missiles. Then Putin would agree to a ceasefire. Lukashenko said he told Kellogg: “Let them tell their client Zelenskyy to stop strikes against Russia. Then we could agree. That’s the position I relayed to the American and asked him, ‘Is there something wrong with it?’ He said, ‘We are working in that direction.’ You do that. That would be a good first step toward stopping this fratricidal war. But I don’t believe they want to end this war.”
