Moscow:
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday he was ready for talks with US counterpart Donald Trump on Ukraine, praising him as a “smart” leader who could have possibly prevented the conflict from breaking out in 2022.
Kiev responded quickly and warned against being excluded from the negotiations.
The Russian leader did not say when the talks would take place, and the Kremlin previously said it was still waiting for “signals” from Washington, despite Trump announcing on Thursday his willingness to meet Putin “immediately.”
“We have always said, and I want to emphasize this again, that we are ready for these negotiations on Ukrainian issues,” Putin told a reporter from Russian state television.
Putin praised Trump as a “smart” and “pragmatic” man and also repeated the Republican's baseless claim that he won the 2020 US presidential election against Joe Biden.
“I cannot but agree with him that if he had been president – if his victory in 2020 had not been stolen – there might not have been the crisis in Ukraine that arose in 2022,” Putin said.
Pressure from Trump
The nearly three-year conflict in Ukraine has brought relations between the two nuclear powers to their lowest level since the Cold War.
Trump, who was inaugurated on Monday, has called the conflict “ridiculous” and threatened Russia with tougher economic sanctions if the country does not agree to halt its offensive.
“If they don't settle this war quickly, like almost immediately, I'm going to impose huge tariffs on Russia, and huge taxes, and also huge sanctions,” the Republican said during a Fox News interview on Thursday.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos on the same day, Trump said he would ask Saudi Arabia and OPEC to cut oil prices, claiming: “If the price fell, the war between Russia and Ukraine would end immediately .”
Putin pushed back on Trump's claim that lower oil prices could hasten the end of the conflict.
“I find it difficult to imagine that decisions will be made that will be harmful to the American economy,” Putin said on Friday.
'Come back to reality'
Neither side has shown signs of de-escalating hostilities since Trump's inauguration, despite the president claiming he would end the conflict within “24 hours” once he takes power.
Kiev warned on Friday against being excluded from talks.
“He (Putin) wants to negotiate the fate of Europe – without Europe. And he wants to talk about Ukraine without Ukraine,” said Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian presidential office.
“This is not going to happen. Putin himself must return to reality or he will be brought back. This is not how it works in the modern world.”
Russian airstrikes near Kiev killed three people and injured several others, Ukrainian officials said Friday, as Ukraine fired 120 drones in at least 12 Russian regions, including the capital Moscow.
Since deploying troops to Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin has carried out drone or missile attacks on Kiev almost every day, apparently targeting military and energy facilities.
“Three people were killed in an enemy attack in the Kiev region,” emergency services said in a statement on social media.
Fragments from a drone had hit a 10-storey residential building after the head of the region said a private home had also been hit, it added.
Black smoke billowed from a residential building damaged during the strike as rescuers pulled out the bodies of the victims, official images from the scene showed.
In Russia, the Ukrainian military said it launched a drone strike overnight that hit an oil refinery, power plant facilities and an electronics factory.
State media reported that a microelectronics factory had halted operations after six Ukrainian drones damaged production and storage facilities in the Bryansk region.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)