Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has left hundreds of thousands of dead and injured, displaced millions of people, reduced towns to rubble and triggered the sharpest confrontation for decades between Moscow and the West.
Putin's heavily qualified support for the US ceasefire proposal looked designed to signal goodwill to Washington and open the door to further talks with US President Donald Trump. But the sheer number of clarifications and conditions that Putin said were needed appeared to rule out a swift ceasefire.
"We agree with the proposals to cease hostilities," Putin told reporters at the Kremlin following talks with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Thursday. "The idea itself is correct, and we certainly support it."
"But we proceed from the fact that this cessation should be such that it would lead to long-term peace and would eliminate the original causes of this crisis."
He went on to list a slew of issues he said needed clarifying and thanked Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, for his efforts to end the war.
Both Moscow and Washington now cast the conflict as a deadly proxy war that could have escalated into World War Three.
Trump, who said he was willing to talk to the Russian leader by phone, called Putin's statement "very promising" and said he hoped Moscow would "do the right thing."
Trump said Steve Witkoff, his special envoy, was engaged in serious talks with the Russians in Moscow on the US proposal, which Kyiv has already agreed to.
The US president said those discussions on Thursday would show if Moscow was ready to make a deal.
"Now we're going to see whether or not Russia is there, and if they're not, it'll be a very disappointing moment for the world," he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Putin was preparing to reject the ceasefire proposal but was afraid to tell Trump.
"That's why in Moscow they are imposing upon the idea of a ceasefire these conditions, so that nothing happens at all, or so that it cannot happen for as long as possible," Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.
Any delay would give Russia more time for its troops to push the last Ukrainian forces out of western Russia as Moscow sticks to demands that Kyiv permanently cede territory claimed by Russia, a position that Ukraine rejects.
The West and Ukraine describe Russia's 2022 invasion as an imperial-style land grab, and have repeatedly vowed to defeat Russian forces. Russian forces control nearly a fifth of Ukraine's territory and have been edging forward since mid-2024.
Putin portrays the conflict as part of an existential battle with a declining and decadent West which he says humiliated Russia after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 by enlarging the NATO military alliance and encroaching on what he considers Moscow's sphere of influence, including Ukraine.
Putin said Russian forces were moving forward along the entire frontline and that the ceasefire would have to ensure Ukraine did not seek to use it simply to regroup.
"How can we and how will we be guaranteed that nothing like this will happen? How will control (of the ceasefire) be organised?" Putin said. "These are all serious questions."
Russia over recent days has pressed a lightning offensive in the western Russian region of Kursk against Ukrainian forces which smashed through the border in August in a bid to divert Moscow's military from eastern Ukraine, gain a bargaining chip and embarrass Putin.
