"Putin Wants To Meet": Trump On Setting Up Meeting With The Russian President
Washington, DC, US: US President-elect Donald Trump has said that a meeting is being arranged between himself and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Republican made the revelation about meeting up with the Russian President on Thursday evening during an interaction with Republican governors at his Mar-a-Lago club. Trump did not reveal the timeline for the meeting.
“He (Putin) wants to meet, and we are setting it up,” he said in remarks at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. “President Putin wants to meet. He has said that even publicly, and we have to get that war over with. That’s a bloody mess,” he said about the Russia-Ukraine war.
While pledging to negotiate an end to the nearly three-year war after he takes up the White House on January 20th, he has expressed scepticism about US military and financial support for Kyiv.
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Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the US has not yet formally requested a meeting. “It would be more appropriate to wait for Trump to take office first,” he further said, as quoted by Russian news agency Tass.
Trump has repeatedly said that he wants to bring the conflict between Russia and Ukraine to a quick end. During his campaign, he has repeatedly pledged to resolve the war within 24 hours. However, earlier this month, he said that the process might take a while.
Trump has nominated Keith Kellogg, a former national security adviser and retired lieutenant general in the US military, as the special envoy to Ukraine and Russia for his second administration. Kellogg has spoken about his ideas on how the US could bring about an end to the war in a research paper published by the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank, in April last year. He proposed that Ukraine should only get further US aid if it agreed to participate in peace talks with Moscow. The paper also suggested that if Russia refused to take part, then the US should continue its aid to Ukraine.
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Trump’s new remarks came amidst heightened speculations regarding a potential diplomatic resolution to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, Kyiv fears that a quick peace deal could possibly come at a high price for the country.
Following Trump’s election win in November, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he believed that, with Trump as president, the war would “end sooner” than it otherwise would have. He said the two had had a “constructive exchange” by phone, though he did not say whether Trump had made any demands regarding possible talks with Russia.
