Vladimir Putin’s government appears to have rejected Donald Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine – while also unveiling its largest conscription drive yet.

The US president has been pushing for a quick resolution to the Ukraine war, even if it means settling on Russia’s terms.

He has managed to secure partial ceasefires in the Black Sea and against Ukrainian energy infrastructure, though both sides claim that truce has already been broken.

But Moscow – who started the war by invading its European neighbour – has still been accused of playing for time and filibustering by Ukraine’s allies.

The Kremlin has even drawn Trump’s ire over the weekend, as he threatened to impose sanctions on Russia unless a ceasefire is secured within a month.

Now Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov seems to have dismissed America’s early plans for a truce altogether.

Speaking to Russia’s International Affairs magazine, he said: “We have not heard from Trump a signal to Kyiv to end the war.

“All that we have today is an attempt to find a certain scheme that would first allow us to achieve a ceasefire, as it is conceived by the Americans.

“And then move on to some other models and schemes, in which, as far as we can judge, today there is no place for our main demand, namely, the solution of problems related to the root causes of this conflict.”

Putin started the conflict in 2014 by illegally annexing the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. He then escalated it into a full-blown war in 2022 by trying to seize more land. 

His troops currently occupie around a fifth of Ukraine’s sovereign territory – land which the Trump administration has hinted could end up under Russia’s formal ownership in a peace deal.

But that is evidently not enough for Russia, according to Ryabkov.

Moscow wants to prevent Ukraine from joining the Nato defence alliance and the EU, too, so that it is not pulled into the West’s sphere of influence.

Putin’s minister said: “This [condition] is completely absent [from negotiations], and it must be overcome. We take the models and solutions proposed by the Americans very seriously, but we cannot accept all this as it is.”

He added: “We certainly have a deeply and carefully thought-out set of our own priorities and approaches to this topic, which is being worked out and worked out, including by our negotiating team at the recent talks with the Americans in Riyadh.”

To make matters even worse for Trump’s anti-war ambitions, Putin will be calling up 160,000 men aged 18-30 – Russia’s highest number of conscripts since 2011 – between April and July.

The Russian president previously declared Russia should increase the overall size of its military so it has 1.5 million active servicemen. 

This conscription drive threatens to puncture American hopes that Russia is moving towards a ceasefire in Ukraine.

Moscow insists these new recruits will not be sent to fight in Ukraine, but there have been previous reports of conscripts dying near the battlefield, and they were deployed to Ukraine during the first stages of the war.

Still, this new call-up and Rybakov’s comments are a bit of U-turn for Russia, considering spokesman Dmitry Peskov said only on Monday that they were still trying to build relations with the US. 

“We are continuing to work with the American side, first of all to build our bilateral relations, which were badly damaged during the previous (US) administration,” he said.

“And we are also working on the implementation of some ideas related to the Ukrainian settlement. This work is underway, but so far there are no specifics that we could or should tell you about. This is a time-consuming process, probably due to its complexity.”

It comes after Finland’s president Alexander Stubb said Trump was feeling a “tad of frustration” towards Russia for dragging its feet.

Trump himself admitted he was getting “pissed off” with Putin after he questioned Zelenskyy’s credibility over the weekend, and threatened to impose secondary tariffs on its oil.

European leaders, who have remained steadfast in their support for Kyiv, also lashed out at Putin for delaying a ceasefire in Ukraine.

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said: “Russia is playing games and not really wanting peace. So our question is, how can we put more pressure on Russia.” 

Meanwhile Poland has suggested a deadline for Russia to accept a ceasefire, and France said Moscow owed the US a clear response on whether it wanted to move towards peace at all.