Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that he and Donald Trump should meet to talk about the prices of war and energy of Ukraine, issues that the president of the United States has highlighted in the first five days of his new administration .
Putin said, however, there could not be serious peace conversations with Ukraine unless west requested from President Volodymyr Zelensky to cancel a 2022 decree that prevents him from negotiating with the Russian leader.
Putin described Trump, who this week threatened to hit Russia with new sanctions and tariffs if he did not negotiate the end of the war, as intelligent and pragmatic. He said he did not expect the president of the United States to make decisions about sanctions that would recover in the economy of the United States.
“Therefore, it is most likely that it will be better for us to fulfill, based on today’s realities, to speak calmly in all those areas that are of interest to both the United States and Russia. We are ready, ”he said, adding that this depended on the elections on the US side.
It was the strongest indication of the Kremlin that is interested in an early summit with Trump after three years of practically no high -level contact with Western leaders due to the war in Ukraine.
Trump, who swore for a second mandate not consecutive on Monday, has also said that he wants to meet Putin and seeks an early end of the conflict. This week he said that the war was “ridiculous” and that he was “destroying” Russia’s economy.
Putin said he had always had “pragmatic and trustworthy relationships with Trump. He also expressed his support for Trump’s false statement that he, not Joe Biden, was the true winner of the US US elections.
“I cannot avoid agreeing with him that if he had been president if his victory had not been stolen in 2020, then maybe there would have been no crisis in Ukraine that arose in 2022,” said Kremlin leader.
In February of that year, Putin launched what he called his “special military operation” in Ukraine.
He pointed out Trump’s comments that he was ready to work together, saying: “We are always open to this.”
Conflict point with Ukraine
But the Russian leader said that a conflictive point with Ukraine was the decree of Zelensky that prohibits conversations with Putin, approved in 2022 after Russia said he was annexing four regions of Ukraine which are partly controlled by their forces, an action condemned as illegal by most countries in the countries of the countries of the United Nations.
Putin said this meant that there could only be “preliminary contours” of a negotiation at this point, not in serious conversations. Any conversation now would not be legitimate, he said, and therefore the results of any negotiation could also be challenged for legal reasons.
He said that western countries that provide “hundreds of billions” in funds to Zelensky should make the Ukrainian leader cancel the decree. “I think, in the end, those who pay the money should force him to do so.
“And I think he will have to do it. But until this decree is canceled, it is quite difficult to talk about the possibility of starting these negotiations and, most importantly, completing them in the necessary way. “
Putin said, however, that there was much to talk about with the Trump administration, including arms control and energy, since both countries were large oil and consumers producers.
This meant that excessively high or excessively low oil prices were bad for both countries, he said. Trump said this week that he was asking OPEC to reduce oil prices. “There is something to talk about here,” Putin said.
