MOSCOW (Reuters) – The Kremlin said on Friday that there was a mutual understanding about the need for a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, but that the details of such an encounter had yet to be worked out.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the two sides agreed at talks in Riyadh this week – their first on how to end the Ukraine war before more formal negotiations – that the two leaders should meet, but “there are no specifics yet.” He noted that both men had said they were keen to talk in person.
“There is a desire of the two presidents, which they expressed, and there is also an instruction to prepare this meeting well so that it will be as productive as possible. It is during the preparation that all the nuances will be discussed,” Peskov said.
Trump said after the Saudi meeting on Tuesday that he would probably meet Putin before the end of the month.
Putin said on Wednesday that the meeting needed to be carefully prepared in order to achieve results.
On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said a Putin-Trump meeting would largely depend on whether progress could be made on ending the war, and Trump wanted to know if Putin was serious about that.
Peskov restated that Putin was open to negotiating a settlement to the conflict.
“We have our goals, connected with our national security, with our national interests, and we are ready to achieve this goals by means of peace talks,” he said.
He denied a Financial Times report that Russia, at the talks in Saudi Arabia, had demanded the withdrawal of NATO forces from eastern Europe – something it sought in negotiations with the United States in the months before the start of the war, whose third anniversary falls on Monday.
Asked about that milestone, Peskov said it was too early to sum up the results of what Moscow calls its special military operation.
“The special military operation continues. All the goals set by the head of state and the supreme commander-in-chief must be achieved,” he said.
(Reporting by Gleb Stolyarov, Writing by Mark Trevelyan and Felix Light; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
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