A day after US President Donald Trump said he wanted to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin as soon as possible, the Kremlin on Friday said the Russian leader is ready to hold a phone call with Trump.
“Putin is ready. We are waiting for signals [from Washington]. Everyone is ready. It is difficult to read the coffee grounds here. As soon as there is something, if there is something, we will inform you,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow on Friday.
Trump on Thursday said he wanted to meet Putin to secure an end to the war with Ukraine and expressed his desire to work towards cutting nuclear arms, something the Kremlin said Putin had made clear he wanted, too. He also added that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to negotiate.
Kremlin urges Trump to resume nuclear disarmament talks
Peskov also said Russia wanted to resume nuclear disarmament talks with the US, responding to Trump’s statement on Thursday that he wanted the world to “denuclearise”.
Negotiations between the world’s two largest nuclear powers have been left at an impasse amid tensions over the Ukraine conflict.
Moscow pulled out of the last remaining arms control agreement with Washington, called “New START”, in 2023 amid a sharp deterioration in relations between the two countries.
Both have indicated they will unilaterally adhere to the warhead limits outlined in the treaty until 2026 but they are yet to agree on a replacement and talks have stalled for months.
“We are interested in starting this negotiation process as soon as possible,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday.
“The ball is in the Americans’ court, who have stopped all substantive contacts,” he added.
Russia dismisses Trump’s linkage of oil prices with Ukraine war
The Ukraine conflict has plunged relations between the two nuclear powers to their lowest levels since the Cold War, with Trump repeatedly promising to end the fighting with a “deal”.
Trump has threatened Russia with tougher economic sanctions if it does not agree to end its nearly three-year offensive.
“If they don’t settle this war soon, like almost immediately, I’m going to put massive tariffs on Russia, and massive taxes, and also big sanctions,” the Republican said during a Fox News interview on Thursday.
The Kremlin rejected Trump’s claim that the conflict in Ukraine could be ended by lowering the price of oil used to fund Moscow’s budget, saying: “This conflict does not depend on oil prices.”
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, Trump had said that he would ask Saudi Arabia and OPEC+ to lower oil prices, saying: “If the price came down, the Russia-Ukraine war would end immediately.”
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Peskov said the conflict was instead based on “threats to Russia’s national security”, “threats to Russians” living in Ukraine and “the lack of desire and complete refusal of Americans and Europeans to listen to Russia’s concerns”.
Lavrov says no signs that Ukraine and West are ready for talks
Hours later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he saw no objective signs that Ukraine or the West were ready for peace talks despite all their statements about the need for such talks.
“Despite the increasingly loud talk about the need for peace talks, there are objectively no practical actions indicating that Kyiv and the West are really ready for them,” Lavrov said, according to a transcript of questions and answers he had received from reporters posted on his ministry’s website.
“On the contrary, Western military supplies to the Ukrainian armed forces are continuing, ultimatums to Russia are being worked out, there is a (Ukrainian) legal ban on negotiations, and the issue of the legitimacy of the Ukrainian authorities is not being resolved,” he said.
Putin said in December that Russia had no conditions to start talks with Ukraine and was ready to negotiate with anyone, including Zelensky.
But he said Zelensky, whose term was due to expire last year but was extended due to martial law, would need to be re-elected for Moscow to consider him a legitimate signatory to any deal to ensure it was legally watertight.
Kyiv says there is no question about Zelensky’s legitimacy and that Russian talk on the issue is designed to undermine his authority.
Three dead near Kyiv
Russia and Ukraine have not shown any signs of de-escalating hostilities since Trump’s inauguration on Monday.
Russian aerial attacks near Kyiv killed three people and wounded several others, Ukrainian officials said Friday, while Ukraine fired 120 drones at at least 12 Russian regions, including the capital Moscow.
The Kremlin has launched drone or missile attacks at Kyiv almost every day since sending troops into Ukraine in February 2022, ostensibly targeting military and energy facilities.
“Three people were killed in an enemy attack in the Kyiv region,” the emergency services said in a statement on social media.
It said fragments of a drone had struck a 10-storey residential building after the head of the region said a private home had also been hit.
Black smoke billowed from a residential building damaged in the strike as rescue workers hauled out the bodies of the victims, official images from the scene showed.
In Russia, the Ukrainian military said it launched an overnight drone attack striking an oil refinery, power station facilities and an electronics plant.
State media reported that a microelectronics factory had halted work after six Ukrainian drones damaged production and storage facilities in the Bryansk region.
Moscow and Kyiv are both vying to gain the upper hand ahead of possible negotiations in the early days of Trump’s administration.
Prior to his inauguration, Trump vowed to end the Ukraine conflict immediately upon taking office, raising concerns in Ukraine it would be forced to make major territorial concessions to Russia.
Moscow has been advancing on the battlefield for months, closing in on the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk.
On Friday, Russia said its forces captured the village of Tymofiivka about 20 kilometres (12 miles) east of the key industrial hub.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and Reuters)
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