Washington and Kiev dismissed demands made by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday that Ukrainian troops withdraw from areas that his country has annexed as a prerequisite for any settlement, ahead of the Ukraine peace summit at the weekend.
If Ukraine also renounces its aim to join NATO, Russia would be prepared to cease fire and enter negotiations immediately, Putin said during a visit to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow.
Washington and Kiev rejected Putin's demands which the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry called absurd and manipulative.
"Putin does not seek peace, he seeks to divide the world," the ministry said on Friday.
Putin is trying to present himself as a peacemaker for the war he began, the ministry said. "Russia's plans are not for peace, but for the continuation of the war, the occupation of Ukraine, the destruction of the Ukrainian people, and further aggression in Europe."
Earlier, Putin told the Russian Foreign Ministry that the fighting could end if Kiev abandons its aim to join NATO and remains neutral, and withdraws from the territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhya plus Crimea.
Russia has not yet been able to conquer Zaporizhzhya and was forced to withdraw from Kherson in autumn 2022.
"Ukraine never wanted this war, and like no other country in the world, Ukraine wants it to end," the Ukrainian ministry said.
Later, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Putin could not dictate the terms of the peace.
"Putin has illegally occupied sovereign Ukrainian territory," Austin said after a NATO defence ministers' meeting in Brussels. "We don't want to see a leader of one country wake up one day and decide that he wants to erase borders and annex the territory of his neighbour. That's not the world that any of us want to live in."
Putin cannot dictate to Ukraine what it must do for peace. Putin could end this war today, he said.
In Germany, former leftist politician Sahra Wagenknecht called for openness to Putin's conditions. "Ukraine and the West should avoid the historic mistake of brusquely rejecting the signals from Moscow as unrealistic maximum demands," said Wagenknecht.
Her eponymous populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) broke away from the hard-left Die Linke (The Left) party and has been campaigning on a mix of left-wing social policy and anti-immigrant views.
"Instead, Putin's initiative should be taken with the necessary seriousness and understood as a starting point for negotiations," Wagenknecht asserted.
Putin's comments were clearly aimed at the current G7 summit in Italy and the Ukraine event opening on Saturday in Switzerland.
The affiliation of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson to Russia is no longer in question, Putin said.
He referred to an alleged referendum in the four regions which was never recognised internationally and only took place in part of the territories - under the strict control of Russian gunmen.
Ukraine should withdraw its army from the parts of these regions that it still controls, Putin added.
He said he was stating Russia's minimum demands in order not to freeze the conflict but to resolve it once and for all.
At the same time, Putin repeated the demands he made when he ordered the invasion of Ukraine in 2022: The creation of a neutral, non-aligned and nuclear-free Ukraine.
The country should also be disarmed and "denazified," said Putin, using a term widely interpreted in the West as meaning the instalment of a Russia-approved leadership in Kiev.
Russia currently occupies around a fifth of Ukraine's territory, including the Crimean peninsula, which it illegally annexed in 2014.
Ukraine has so far adhered to its stated goal of retaking the occupied territory, including Crimea. President Volodymyr Zelensky is also calling for the prosecution of Russian war crimes and Russian reparations for the destruction caused.
The conference in Switzerland was only intended to distract attention from the real causes of the conflict, namely the policies of the West, Putin said.
"The West is ignoring our interests," he told Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and other top Russian diplomats, twice explaining how he believed the war had arisen, starting with the pro-European Maidan protests in Kiev in 2013.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed that Putin's speech was not an ultimatum, but a genuine peace initiative.
Moscow's hope is apparently to dissuade countries of the global south from supporting Ukraine at the summit. At the same time, Peskov threatened that Russia would up its demands if the offer was rejected.
The Swiss conference on Saturday and Sunday primarily aims to mobilize international support for Ukraine - including from countries that are friendly to Russia.
Russia's participation in the dialogue process is only planned as a second step.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also sharply criticized the Russian president's statements, calling them a proposal for more aggression, more occupation, not a peace proposal.
It is not up to Ukraine to withdraw its armed forces from Ukrainian territory, but Russia must withdraw its armed forces from occupied Ukrainian land, Stoltenberg said.
Zelensky arrived in Switzerland Friday evening to attend the summit.
"We have two days of active work ahead of us with countries from all corners of the world united by a common goal - to bring Ukraine closer to a just and lasting peace," he wrote on social media.
The number of delegations for the international Ukraine conference in Switzerland has risen to 100, the Swiss Foreign Ministry confirmed, saying these include political leaders as well as organizations.
They include 57 heads of state and prime ministers from all regions of the world. Other countries are represented by high-ranking diplomats.
Around half of the attendees are from Europe and the other half from the rest of the world.
