President Vladimir Putin's top foreign policy aide said on Thursday a 30-day ceasefire proposed by the United States to pause the war in Ukraine would give Russia "nothing" while gifting Kyiv's forces a much-needed battlefield respite.

Russian forces have been advancing since mid-2024 and control nearly a fifth of Ukraine's territory, three years after sending tens of thousands of troops into its neighbour in a war that U.S. President Donald Trump has said he will halt.

Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff arrived in Moscow on Thursday for talks. Russian officials said U.S. national security adviser Mike Waltz had provided details on the ceasefire idea on Wednesday and Russia was ready to discuss it.

Trump had said in the White House on Wednesday that he hoped the Kremlin would agree to the U.S. proposal for a 30-day ceasefire that Ukraine said it would support.

Yuri Ushakov, a former ambassador to Washington who speaks for Putin on major foreign policy issues, told Russian state TV that he had spoken to Waltz on Wednesday to outline Russia's position on the ceasefire.

"I stated our position that this is nothing other than a temporary respite for the Ukrainian military, nothing more," Ushakov said.

"It gives us nothing. It only gives the Ukrainians an opportunity to regroup, gain strength and to continue the same thing," he later added, saying he felt the proposal needed to be updated to take account of Russia's interests.

Ushakov, who has served alongside Putin in the Kremlin since 2012, stopped short of rejecting the U.S. proposal outright, however, saying the president would likely speak to the media later on Thursday and outline Russia's position in more detail.

Ushakov said Moscow's goal was "a long-term peaceful settlement that takes into account the legitimate interests of our country and our well-known concerns."

"It seems to me that no one needs any steps that (merely) imitate peaceful actions in this situation," he said, making clear he thought that the Europeans were trying to put Moscow in a position where it looked, wrongly, as if Russia was against peace.

The remarks from such a senior Kremlin official indicate that Putin, Russia's paramount leader since 1999, thinks that Russia's advances on the battlefield in Ukraine and in western Russia give Moscow a strong hand in peace negotiations.

It was unclear how Trump would react though, after saying on Wednesday that he hoped Moscow would agree to a ceasefire to end the "bloodbath" and that in his first term he had been tougher on Russia than other presidents.