WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — US President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday that Russian leader Vladimir Putin wanted to meet and that a rendezvous between the pair was being arranged.
He made the statement just a week and a half before taking office, following promises during his campaign to bring peace to Ukraine, which has been under Russian invasion since February 2022.
“He wants to meet, and we’re setting it up,” Trump said at a meeting with Republican governors at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
“President Putin wants to meet, he’s said that even publicly, and we have to get that war over with, that’s a bloody mess.”
The Kremlin welcomed Trump’s “readiness to solve problems through dialogue,” Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Friday.
“No conditions are required. What is required is mutual desire and political will to solve problems through dialogue,” he told reporters in a daily briefing.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that without the support of the US. his country would have lost the conflict.
He is pushing Trump to back his “peace-through-strength” proposal, seeking North Atlantic Treaty Organization protections and concrete Western security guarantees as part of any settlement to end the fighting.
Meanwhile, three people were killed Friday morning and six were wounded by Ukrainian strikes on the Russian-occupied part of Donetsk region, officials said.
The Russian-installed regional chief, Denis Pushilin, said that during the morning rush-hour Ukraine struck a square in the region’s main city of Donetsk with precision-guided long-range missiles fired by HIMARS rocket launchers.
The strikes on Shakhtarska Ploshcha, or Miners’ Square killed two people and wounded two more, Russia’s Investigative Committee told RIA Novosti news agency, accusing Ukraine of deliberately firing on civilian infrastructure.
A video released by Russian media filmed by a dashcam showed two large explosion followed by bursts of flame and several other explosions near a street where a bus and cars were passing.
Video footage filmed by investigators, released by TASS news agency, showed facades torn off and windows blown out in buildings, shrapnel holes in a car and what an investigator says are fragments from a HIMARS rocket.
Donetsk city, under Russian control since 2014 and far from the front line, has been relatively spared from the mass destruction wrought on other eastern Ukrainian cities by the conflict.
Ukraine also directly hit a multi-story apartment block in the town of Svitlodarsk closer to the front line, killing a woman and wounding four residents, Pushilin said.