Ukraine to propose peace plan to Russia after global consensus — Zelenskyy

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he would present Moscow a proposal for ending the war once it had been agreed by the international community.

He made the commitment in Switzerland on Saturday during an address to an inaugural summit on peace in his country, attended by more than 90 countries, but not Russia.

Zelenskyy told the forum he hoped the summit would lay the groundwork for a "just" and "lasting" settlement with Russia.

"We must decide together what a just peace means for the world and how it can be achieved in a lasting way," he said.

"Then it will be communicated to the representatives of Russia, and so that at the second peace summit we can fix the real end of the war," he added.

Zelenskyy did not say if he was prepared to engage in talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin directly.

On the eve of the summit, Putin laid out his own conditions for ending the conflict.

He called on Ukraine to withdraw its troops from the south and east of the country and renounce its ambitions to join the NATO military alliance, conditions quickly dismissed by Zelenskyy.

'Unconstructive'

The Kremlin earlier said that the West has reacted unconstructively to Russian President Vladimir Putin's proposals for a new security architecture and peace talks with Ukraine. "There is a lot of it, a huge amount of it — official reaction, official statements. Of an unconstructive nature," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in response to a question about whether there had been an official reaction to Putin's proposals, Russian news agencies reported.

Putin set out on Friday what he said were Russia's preconditions for starting peace talks with Ukraine, saying Russia would end the war only if Kiev agreed to drop its NATO ambitions and hand over four provinces claimed by Moscow — demands Kiev swiftly rejected as tantamount to surrender.