By Guy Faulconbridge
MOSCOW (Reuters) – The Kremlin said on Sunday contacts with U.S. President Donald Trump’s team were moving ahead very well but that it was too early to expect instant results due to the level of damage done to relations under Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden.
Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, has repeatedly said he wants to end the “bloodbath” of the three-year war in Ukraine – which his administration now casts as a proxy conflict between the United States and Russia, echoing Moscow’s stance.
After his special envoy Steve Witkoff held talks with President Vladimir Putin, Trump said on Saturday discussions aimed at ending the war may be going OK, but “there’s a point at which you just have to either put up or shut up”.
“Everything is going very well,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian state television’s most prominent Kremlin reporter, Pavel Zarubin, when asked about the differing views of the state of relations between Moscow and Washington.
Contacts were underway at several levels, Peskov said, including via the foreign ministry, intelligence agencies and Putin’s investment envoy Kirill Dmitriev.
“But, of course, it is impossible to expect any instant results,” Peskov said, citing what he called the damage done to bilateral relations under Biden.
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine triggered the worst confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis – which is considered to be the time when the two Cold War superpowers came closest to intentional nuclear war.
As Witkoff held talks with Putin on Friday in the former Russian imperial capital St. Petersburg about the search for a peace deal for Ukraine, Trump told Russia to “get moving”.
Putin was shown on state TV greeting Witkoff, who held his hand to his heart in greeting, at the start of the talks and state news agencies later said they lasted over four hours.
Asked if a Putin-Trump meeting was getting nearer, the Kremlin’s Peskov said the two powers were “walking along this path together very patiently” but that trying to restore relations took serious and painstaking work.
His words suggested that such a meeting “requires more work, requires more time”.
European leaders and Ukraine describe the 2022 invasion as an imperial-style land grab by Putin, and European leaders have repeatedly demanded that Russia be defeated on the battlefield, although Moscow forces control nearly one-fifth of Ukraine.
Putin casts the war in Ukraine as part of a battle with a declining West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 by enlarging the NATO military alliance and encroaching on what he considers Moscow’s sphere of influence, including Ukraine.
(Reporting by Reuters; editing by Mark Heinrich)
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