A senior aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin threw cold water on a ceasefire overture that U.S. Special Envoy Steven Witkoff brought to Moscow on Thursday even before U.S. President Donald Trump’s negotiator got out of his plane.

“It seems to me that no one needs any steps that imitate peaceful actions in this situation,” Yuri Ushakov said, adding that this was his personal opinion. A former Russian ambassador to Washington from Putin’s first term, Ushakov has long been seen as a hard-liner with close ties to the Russian president.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz met with senior Ukrainian officials in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Tuesday and extracted an agreement for a 30-day ceasefire in exchange for a resumption of intelligence-sharing and supply of arms.

The deal would also have allowed for an exchange of prisoners and the opening of corridors during a pause in fighting to deliver humanitarian relief to civilians in hot zones of the conflict.

President Trump has indicated his desire to reach a peace agreement over Ukraine quickly, but unsurprising the Russians — who are making gains on the ground both in Ukraine and their own province of Kursk where Ukrainians have captured territory last year — are saying ‘not so fast.’

On Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov warned about “getting ahead of things” when asked about the U.S. ceasefire proposal.

“Any agreements – with all the understanding of the need for compromise – on our terms, not American. And this is not boasting, but understanding that real agreements are still being written there, at the front. Which they should understand in Washington, too,” Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the international relations committee in Russia’s Duma, or parliament, said earlier in the week, predicting what sounds like it may be a chilly response to the U.S. proposal.

Sources close to the White House have indicated Trump would like to meet Putin as soon as the Russian Orthodox Easter, which falls in six weeks, to reach a broader agreement for ending the war.

Witkoff is scheduled to meet with Putin later today to discuss specifics, which Russian officials have expressed interest in hearing more about.