By Dmitry Antonov
MOSCOW (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin is ready to discuss Ukraine with Donald Trump but that does not mean he is willing to alter Moscow’s demands, the Kremlin said on Friday.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov made the remarks after being asked at his daily news briefing if Putin’s readiness to talk to the Republican president-elect reflected a willingness to change those demands.
“The president has never said that the goals of the special military operation are changing. On the contrary, he has repeatedly said that they remain the same,” Peskov said.
“All this concerns the security interests of our country, the security interests of the Russian people living there. Therefore, there was no talk of any changes here.”
Putin on June 14 set out his terms for an end to the war: Ukraine would have to drop its NATO ambitions and withdraw all of its troops from all of the territory of four regions claimed by Russia.
Ukraine rejected that, saying it would be tantamount to capitulation, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has put forward a “victory plan” that includes requests for additional military support from the West.
On the campaign trail, Trump criticised the scale of U.S. military and financial support for Kyiv and said he could end the war within 24 hours, without saying how.
Zelenskiy has congratulated Trump, but said he does not know how the American plans to end the conflict quickly. “If it’s just fast, it means losses for Ukraine. I just don’t yet understand how this could be in any other way. Maybe we do not know something, do not see,” he said on Thursday.
Putin on Thursday congratulated Trump on winning the U.S. election, praised him for showing courage when a gunman tried to assassinate him in July, and said Moscow was ready for dialogue with Trump. He said comments that Trump had made about trying to end the war were worthy of attention.
Trump told NBC he had not talked to Putin since his election victory but “I think we’ll speak”.
Asked about a possible phone call between the two men, Peskov said there was nothing concrete on it to report yet, and it would be premature to talk of any improvement in Russia-U.S. ties.
But Putin had made it clear many times he remained open for dialogue, he said.
The Kremlin says relations with the United States are at an historic low because of Washington’s support for Ukraine and its imposition of sanctions against Russia.
Putin last spoke to Biden in February 2022, days before the start of the war, when the American warned him of a swift and severe Western response if he went ahead with an invasion.
The Kremlin last month denied reports that Trump had spoken to Putin since leaving office after U.S. journalist Bob Woodward in his book “War” quoted an unnamed Trump aide as saying that Trump and Putin may have spoken as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021.
(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov; Writing by Mark Trevelyan and Anastasia Teterevleva; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
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