Trump, Putin Set For Talk

The Kremlin said Friday that President Vladimir Putin was open to talks with Donald Trump after the incoming US president said a meeting between the pair was being set up.

“The president has repeatedly stated his openness to contact with international leaders, including the US president, including Donald Trump,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

Trump, who will be inaugurated on January 20, has repeatedly said he can bring a swift end to the nearly three-year conflict between Russia and Ukraine, without presenting a concrete plan.

On Thursday he said a meeting with Putin was being arranged.

“He wants to meet, and we’re setting it up,” Trump said at a meeting with Republican governors at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

“President Putin wants to meet, he’s said that even publicly, and we have to get that war over with, that’s a bloody mess,” he said.

The Kremlin welcomed Trump’s “readiness to solve problems through dialogue,” Peskov said Friday, adding Moscow had no prerequisites for staging the meeting.

“No conditions are required. What is required is mutual desire and political will to solve problems through dialogue,” he told reporters in a daily briefing.

Trump’s hopes for a swift end to the conflict have stoked concern in Kyiv that Ukraine could be forced to accept a peace deal on terms favourable to Moscow.

Washington has delivered tens of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale military offensive in February 2022.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that without such support his country would have lost the conflict.

He is pushing Trump to back his “peace-through-strength” proposal, seeking NATO protections and concrete Western security guarantees as part of any settlement to end the fighting.