Putin is open to meeting with Trump after inauguration, Kremlin says

The Kremlin said Friday that President Vladimir Putin is open to a meeting with President-elect Donald Trump after he is sworn in to office on Jan. 20.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made the comment in response to a question about Trump’s remarks Thursday that a meeting to discuss the war in Ukraine with Putin was being set up.

“President Putin has repeatedly stated his openness to contacts with international leaders, including the U.S. president, including Donald Trump,” Peskov said. He added that “no conditions are required” for the meeting to happen.

“What is required is a mutual desire and political will to dialogue and to solve existing problems through dialogue,” Peskov said. “We see that Mr. Trump is declaring his readiness to solve problems through dialogue. We welcome that.”

The Kremlin did not confirm that a meeting is being scheduled, as Trump said Thursday, but said that Russia was working on the assumption that both sides were open to it and “there will be some movement” on the matter once Trump enters the Oval Office.

“He wants to meet, and we’re setting it up,” Trump said during a gathering with Republican governors at his Mar-a-Lago resort. “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,” Trump said.

Ukraine also expects high-level contact with the new U.S. administration immediately after Trump takes office, including an eventual meeting between the new president and President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said on Friday.

Kyiv has been making overtures to the Trump circle to better grasp the incoming president’s campaign promises to quickly end the war in Ukraine.

“We are waiting for a meeting between our presidents because for us the main thing is to work together with America … we are preparing for contacts at the highest and high levels immediately after the inauguration,” spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi told reporters at a briefing in Kyiv.

Putin has said he is ready to talk with Trump but voiced a hard-line stance on the potential peace negotiations on Ukraine. He has doubled down on Russia’s claim to occupied eastern Ukrainian territories and said that Moscow does not want a long-term ceasefire agreement but a “durable peace secured with guarantees for the Russian Federation and its citizens.”

Some Russia watchers expressed skepticism that Putin would agree to a ceasefire while his troops appear to have the initiative and would instead insist on Zelensky making painful concessions.

Putin said last June that Russia was willing to end the war if Ukraine renounced its NATO membership ambitions and withdrew from four regions that Russia partially occupied and enshrined in its Constitution as “new” territories. Ukraine dismissed these demands for months, describing them as tantamount to surrender.

Trump’s advisers have talked about plans to end the war that would effectively cede large parts of Ukraine to Russia. The incoming president’s special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, proposed a peace plan that calls for a quick ceasefire and negotiated settlement, implying essentially freezing the battlefield along the line of fighting.

Kellogg proposed tying U.S. aid to Kyiv’s participation in peace talks, while threatening to give Ukraine “everything it needs to kill in the field” if Moscow refuses to negotiate. The plan also suggests Russia might engage in talks if the United States delayed Ukraine’s NATO membership for an extended period.

During his annual phone-in with journalists in Moscow at the end of last year, Putin claimed he had not spoken to Trump in more than four years but stressed that he was “ready” to discuss the war with the incoming U.S. leader “at any time.”

President Joe Biden held a summit with Putin in June 2021 in Geneva. The three-hour meeting consisted largely of the two sides airing complaints about each other but was described as a success.

The tone of the Geneva summit contrasted with Putin’s dominance at the Helsinki summit with Trump in 2018, when the U.S. president expressed admiration for the Russian leader and shocked American intelligence officials by defying their findings and supporting Putin’s claim that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Trump met with Putin without officials, just an interpreter.

Ultimately, Putin’s high hopes for Trump delivered little for Moscow, and his reelection has been received coolly by the Russian officials who are wary of his unpredictably in foreign policy and speculate that he would approach the resolution of the war in Ukraine with the goal of projecting American geopolitical strength that would curb Russian ambitions.