Donald Trump has stated that a meeting between him and Russian President Vladimir Putin is being organized.
The elected U.S. president did not give a specific timeframe for when the meeting might take place.
“He wants to meet, and we are setting it up,” Trump said in a speech at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Russian news agency Tass quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying that the U.S. has not yet officially requested a meeting.
Trump has promised to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine immediately after taking office on January 20 and has expressed skepticism about U.S. military and financial support for Kyiv, according to BBC.
“President Putin wants to meet,” Trump said on Thursday.
“He has said this publicly, and we need to end that war. It’s a bloody mess.”
Trump has appointed Keith Kellogg, a former national security adviser and retired U.S. Army lieutenant general, as his special envoy to Ukraine and Russia for his second administration.
Kellogg presented his ideas on how the U.S. could end the war in a research paper published by the pro-Trump American First Institute of Policy in April last year.
He proposed that Ukraine should only receive further assistance from the U.S. if it agrees to participate in peace talks with Moscow.
The media also suggested that if Moscow refuses to participate, the U.S. should continue its support for Ukraine, according to BBC and Klankosova.tv.
After Trump’s victory in the November elections, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he believed that, with Trump as president, the war would “end sooner” than it otherwise would have.
He mentioned that the two had a “constructive exchange” over the phone, though he did not indicate whether Trump had made any requests regarding possible talks with Russia.
