By Vladimir Soldatkin and Anastasia Lyrchikova
MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that he and Donald Trump should meet to talk about the Ukraine war and energy prices, issues that the U.S. president has highlighted in the first five days of his new administration.
Putin said, however, that there could be no serious peace talks with Ukraine unless the West leaned on President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to cancel a 2022 decree that bars him from negotiating with the Russian leader.
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Zelenskiy said Putin was trying to manipulate the U.S. president’s efforts to secure peace.
Putin described Trump, who this week threatened to hit Russia with new sanctions and tariffs if it did not negotiate an end to the war, as smart and pragmatic. He said he did not expect the U.S. president to make decisions on sanctions that would rebound on the U.S. economy.
“Therefore, most likely, it would be better for us to meet, based on the realities of today, to talk calmly on all those areas that are of interest to both the United States and Russia. We are ready,” he told a Russian television reporter, while adding that this depended on the choices of the U.S. side.
It was the strongest indication yet from the Kremlin that it is keen for an early summit with Trump after three years of virtually no high-level contact with Western leaders because of the war in Ukraine.
Trump, who was sworn in for a second, non-consecutive term on Monday, has also said that he wants to meet Putin and that he seeks an early end to the conflict. He said this week that the war was “ridiculous” and that it was “destroying” Russia’s economy.
Putin said he had always had “pragmatic and trusting” relations with Trump. He also voiced support for Trump’s false claim that he, not Joe Biden, was the real winner of the 2020 U.S. election.
“I can’t help agreeing with him that if he had been president, if his victory had not been stolen in 2020, then perhaps there would not have been the crisis in Ukraine that arose in 2022,” the Kremlin leader said. In February that year Putin launched what he called his “special military operation” in Ukraine.
He noted Trump’s comments that he was ready to work together, saying: “We are always open to this.”
STICKING POINT WITH UKRAINE
But the Russian leader said a sticking point with Ukraine was the Zelenskiy decree banning talks with Putin, passed in 2022 after Russia said it was annexing four regions of Ukraine that are partly controlled by its forces – an action condemned as illegal by most countries at the United Nations.
Putin said this meant there could only be “preliminary outlines” of a negotiation at this point, not serious talks. Any talks held now would not be legitimate, he said, and therefore the results of any negotiation could also be challenged on legal grounds.
He said the Western countries that are providing “hundreds of billions” in funding to Zelenskiy should make the Ukrainian leader cancel the decree.
“I think that, in the end, those who pay the money should force him to do it. And I think that he will have to do it. But until this decree is cancelled, it is quite difficult to talk about the possibility of starting these negotiations – and, most importantly, completing them in the necessary way.”
Within hours, Zelenskiy said Ukraine’s military command had received a report by the head of the foreign intelligence service about “Russia’s military potential and Putin’s readiness to continue the war and manipulate world leaders”.
“Specifically, he is trying to manipulate the U.S. president’s desire to achieve peace,” he said in his nightly video address. “I am confident that no Russian manipulations will succeed any longer.”
Zelenskiy made no reference to the 2022 decree declaring that negotiations with Putin were impossible.
In his comments, Putin said there was a lot to talk about with the Trump administration, including on arms control and energy, given that both countries were major oil producers and consumers.
This meant that excessively high or excessively low oil prices were bad for both countries, he said. Trump said this week he was calling on OPEC to bring oil prices down.
“There is something for us to talk about here,” Putin said.
(Additional reporting by Dmitry Antonov, Maxim Rodionov, Ksenia Orlova and Ron PopeskiWriting by Mark TrevelyanEditing by Frances Kerry)
