United States President-elect, Donald Trump, has revealed that plans are underway for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
However, no specific timeline has been provided for the meeting.
“He wants to meet, and we are setting it up,” Trump stated at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
The Russian news agency Tass cited Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, who confirmed that the US has yet to make a formal request for the meeting.
Trump, who is set to assume office on January 20, has pledged to negotiate an end to the ongoing war in Ukraine shortly after his inauguration.
He has also expressed reservations about the US’s military and financial backing for Kyiv.
“President Putin wants to meet,” Trump reiterated 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 nominated Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant-general and former national security adviser, as special envoy to Ukraine and Russia.
Kellogg detailed his approach to ending the conflict in a research paper for the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank, published in April 2024..
In the paper, Kellogg suggested that continued US assistance to Ukraine should be conditional on its willingness to engage in peace talks with Moscow.
However, if Russia declined to participate, he proposed that the US maintain its support for Ukraine.
Following Trump’s election victory in November, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed optimism, suggesting that the war could conclude sooner under Trump’s leadership.
Zelensky described their phone conversation as a “constructive exchange” but did not disclose whether Trump had outlined any specific terms for potential negotiations with Russia.
