Donald Trump has said that a meeting is being arranged between himself and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The US president-elect gave no timeline for when the meeting might take place.
“He wants to meet and we are setting it up,” he said in remarks at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
The Kremlin said in response that it was open to the talks, but that no details had been confirmed yet.
Trump has promised to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine soon after he takes office on 20 January and has expressed scepticism about US military and financial support for Kyiv.
“President Putin wants to meet,” he said on Thursday.
“He has said that even publicly and we have to get that war over with. That’s a bloody mess.”
A spokesman for Ukraine’s foreign ministry said on Friday that Kyiv expected high-level talks to take place with the Trump administration after the inauguration.
This includes an eventual meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The president-elect has nominated Keith Kellogg, a former national security adviser and retired lieutenant-general in the US military, to be special envoy to Ukraine and Russia for his second administration.
Kellogg set out his ideas for 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, however, that if Moscow refused to take part then the US should continue its aid to Ukraine.
Following Trump’s election win in November, 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 did not say whether Trump had made any demands regarding possible talks with Russia.
(BBC)
