The government of Putin has told the Trump administrator that Russia will not settle on a peace deal unless it is agreed that Russia will be the provider of Ukraine’s security, and the Russians are not budging on this. As we read in the New York Times:

Russia’s top diplomat on Wednesday said the country would insist on being a part of any future security guarantees for Ukraine, a condition that European and Ukrainian officials widely see as absurd.

It was the clearest sign yet that enormous gaps remain in the negotiations over a possible end to Russia’s invasion. And it added to the uncertainty over how a European effort to rally a “coalition of the willing” to protect a postwar Ukraine, possibly with Western soldiers stationed inside the country, would fit into President Trump’s plans for a peace deal with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“Seriously discussing issues of ensuring security without the Russian Federation is a utopia, a road to nowhere,” Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, told reporters in Moscow after a meeting with his Jordanian counterpart.

Kyiv’s supporters largely dismiss the idea that Russia could be a part of ensuring Ukraine’s future security, given that it launched its military intervention there in 2014 and its full-scale invasion in 2022. But Mr. Lavrov signaled that Mr. Putin had not budged from his insistence on having a decisive say over Ukraine’s future sovereignty as part of any peace deal.

“We cannot agree that now it is proposed that security issues, collective security, be resolved without the Russian Federation,” Mr. Lavrov said. “This will not work.”

The Trump administration has trumpeted a breakthrough in talks with Russia this month, claiming that Mr. Putin had accepted a proposal for the West to provide security guarantees for Ukraine as strong as Article 5 of the NATO charter, which stipulates that an attack on one alliance member is considered an attack on all.

Mr. Trump said on Monday that Mr. Putin had “agreed that Russia would accept security guarantees for Ukraine,” calling it a “very significant step.” Steve Witkoff, a special envoy for Mr. Trump, said that Mr. Putin had made the “game-changing” concession of letting the United States and Europe offer “Article 5-like protection” to Ukraine.

The Kremlin has long said it is open to offers of such guarantees for Ukraine from foreign countries. But with a catch: Russia, the Russian government says, should be one of the guarantors, and no Western troops should be based in Ukraine.

Those caveats remain in place, Mr. Lavrov indicated on Wednesday. He said that the kind of security guarantee for Ukraine that Russia would accept was of the sort that Russia and Ukraine were negotiating when they held peace talks in the early months of the war in 2022.

The draft peace treaty that Russia and Ukraine negotiated at the time, which they never finalized before talks fell apart, would have banned Ukraine from entering into military alliances like NATO or allowing foreign troops to be based on its territory. It stipulated that a group of “guarantor states” — including Britain, China, the United States, France and Russia itself — would come to Ukraine’s defense if it were attacked again.