Russia said Friday that a 30-day pause on Ukrainian energy site strikes has expired, a step away from peace just as Washington threatened to exit ceasefire efforts if progress was not made soon.

US President Donald Trump has been pressing Moscow and Kyiv to agree to a truce, but has failed to extract any major concessions from the Kremlin, despite repeated negotiations between his administration and Russia on the three-year war.

One of the few commitments Trump had wrangled from Putin -- a temporary moratorium on striking Ukrainian energy infrastructure -- "expired" on Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in response to an AFP question.

Neither side set up a mechanism for monitoring the moratorium and both sides routinely accused the other of breaking it.

"As of this time, there have been no other instructions from the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, President Putin," Peskov told reporters.

Moments earlier, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington needed to figure out soon whether a ceasefire was "doable in the short term".

"Because if it's not, then I think we're just going to move on," he told........

© International Business Times