Putin ready for meeting with Trump to settle Ukraine conflict – Kremlin

Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to meet with US President-elect Donald Trump without any conditions, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, TASS reports.

Photo: commons.wikimedia.org by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Donald Trump

"No conditions are required for this. What is required is a mutual desire and political will to conduct a dialogue and resolve existing problems through dialogue," Peskov said expressing the Kremlin's position.

Putin had repeatedly stated his openness to contacts with international leaders, including with Trump, Dmitry Peskov noted.

According to the official, the date for the meeting has not been set yet.

"We proceed from mutual readiness," the Kremlin spokesman said, noting that new details about the meeting may emerge after Trump's inauguration on January 20.

Donald Trump announced a meeting with Putin when speaking to reporters at his residence in Florida. According to him, both US and Russian sides started working on the summit.

"President Putin wants to meet. He has said that even publicly and we have to get that war over with. That's a bloody mess," Trump said.

Details

The 2018 Russia–United States summit (also known as the Helsinki 2018 or the Trump–Putin summit) was a summit meeting between United States President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on 16 July 2018, in Helsinki, Finland. The Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs officially titled the summit as the #HELSINKI2018 Meeting and it was hosted by the President of Finland Sauli Niinistö. During a post-summit joint press conference with Putin, Trump did not accept Russian interference was part of the 2016 U.S. elections. Trump's omissions provoked an uproar across the political spectrum, including from some of his usual allies. One day later, Trump amended part of his remarks, contending that he had misspoken due to an incorrectly perceived "double-negative". Although the proceedings of the summit were orderly and diplomatic, both Trump and Putin were received poorly by both sides of the political spectrum in the United States, with some commentators saying that the summit became the event where Putin "cemented his status, and the status of his country, as public enemy #1 in America," ushering in the lowest point of Russia–United States relations since the early 1980s.