Putin-Trump meeting requires more work and time, Kremlin says
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.
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.
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”.
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”.
