Full ceasefire in Ukraine 'just a breath away'

According to RIA Novosti on March 21, US State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said that a complete ceasefire in Ukraine is “just a breath away.”

"We are one breath away from a complete ceasefire, where we can start talking not just about peace in a week or six months, but about lasting peace," Mr Bruce told News Nation.

On the Russian side, the official spokeswoman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zakharova, said that the Russian delegation will participate in consultations with the US, scheduled to take place on March 24 in Riyadh.

The Russian delegation will be led by Senator Grigory Karasin, Chairman of the Federation Council's International Affairs Committee, and Advisor to the FSB Director Sergei Beseda. Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov informed that consultations between Russian and American experts in Riyadh will be on the Black Sea initiative.

In recent weeks, the US and Russia have shown positive signs of resolving the conflict in Ukraine, aiming for “a lasting peace”. However, according to analysts from the US magazine The National Interest, instead of being a driving force for the process, Europe is in a “parallel universe”.

“A stunning turnaround in relations between Russia and Ukraine has led to constructive talks with President Putin this week. Yet Europe still lives in a parallel universe,” analysts said.

In their view, European leaders do not seem to understand that the deployment of NATO troops as a “peacekeeping force” would certainly not be acceptable to Russia in any peace agreement, and that talk of a “voluntary alliance” could derail negotiations with Moscow.

“European elites are no longer accustomed to thinking about hard security strategy in unemotional and non-ideological terms. Russia, by contrast, has a strategy and the hard power to back it up,” analysts say.

Despite all this, European politicians are still lobbying for the rapid militarization of Europe and the deployment of a “coalition of the willing” in Ukraine, even if this risks a dangerous escalation and prolonging of the conflict.

Earlier, Bloomberg reported that French President Macron and British Prime Minister Starmer were trying to attract 37 countries to form a so-called "coalition of the willing" - a group of countries willing to deploy peacekeeping forces in Ukraine and provide Kiev with security guarantees.