Donald Trump has announced that efforts are underway to organize a meeting between him and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The US president-elect did not provide a specific timeframe for when the meeting might occur.
“He wants to meet and we are setting it up,” he shared during comments at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Russian news agency Tass cites Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as stating that the US has yet to formally request a meeting.
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Trump has vowed to initiate peace negotiations to end the war in Ukraine shortly after he assumes office on January 20. He has also expressed doubts about the US military and financial support for Kyiv.
“President Putin wants to meet,” he remarked on Thursday.
“He has said that even publicly and we have to get that war over with. That’s a bloody mess.”
For his second administration, Trump has selected Keith Kellogg, a former national security adviser and retired lieutenant-general in the US military, to serve as the special envoy to Ukraine and Russia.
Kellogg outlined his strategy for resolving the war in a research paper released by the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank, in April of the previous year.
He suggested that Ukraine should receive additional US aid only if it agreed to engage in peace talks with Moscow.
However, the paper also recommended that the US should continue supporting Ukraine if Moscow refused to participate in the talks.
Following Trump’s victory in November, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed his belief that, under Trump’s leadership, the war would “end sooner” than it would under other circumstances.
He mentioned that they had a “constructive exchange” over the phone but did not specify whether Trump had set any conditions regarding potential negotiations with Russia.
BBC
