The Kremlin said Friday that President Vladimir Putin is ready for talks with Donald Trump, the announcement coming after the incoming US president said a meeting between the two leaders was being planned.
Trump, who took office on January 20, has said he could quickly end the nearly three-year war between Russia and Ukraine, but has not presented any concrete plan. “The president has repeatedly said he is open to contacts with international leaders, including US President Donald Trump,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
Trump said on Thursday that a meeting with Putin was being arranged. “He wants to meet, and we’re arranging it,” Trump said during a meeting with Republican governors at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. “President Putin wants to meet, he’s said that publicly, and we have to end that war, that’s a bloody situation.”
Peskov said on Friday that the Kremlin welcomed Trump’s “readiness to resolve the issue through dialogue.” He said there were no preconditions for holding a meeting with Moscow.
“No conditions are necessary. Mutual will and political will are needed to resolve the problem through dialogue,” he said at a daily press conference. Trump’s hopes for a quick end to the conflict have raised concerns in Kiev that Ukraine could be forced to accept a peace deal on terms favorable to Moscow.
Washington has provided tens of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale military invasion in February 2022. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that his country would have lost the war without such support. He is pressing Trump to support his “peace through strength” proposal, which seeks NATO protection and solid Western security guarantees as part of any solution to end the fighting.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry has rejected Trump’s comments about any upcoming meeting with Putin. “Trump has already talked about plans for such a meeting, so we don’t see anything new in this,” spokesman Georgy Tykhi said. “Our position is very simple: we in Ukraine want to end the war fairly for all of Ukraine, and we see that President Trump is also determined to end the war.”
Tykhi said Ukraine is preparing for high-level talks between Kiev and Washington “immediately” after Trump and Zelensky take office.
