President Vladimir Putin is open to peace in Ukraine and intense work is going on with the United States, but the conflict is so complicated that the rapid progress which Washington wants is difficult to achieve, the Kremlin said Wednesday.
"The president remains open to political and diplomatic methods of resolving this conflict," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
Peskov said Russia's aims must be achieved and that Moscow's preference was to achieve those aims peacefully.
He noted Putin had expressed a willingness for direct talks with Ukraine, but that there had been no answer yet from Kyiv.
"Unfortunately, we haven't heard any statements in this context from Kyiv. So we don't know whether Kyiv is ready or not," Peskov told reporters in English.
President Donald Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, has repeatedly said he wants to end the "bloodbath" of the more than three-year war in Ukraine – which his administration now casts as a proxy conflict between the United States and Russia.
"We understand that Washington is willing to achieve a quick success in this process," Peskov said in English. But TASS quoted Peskov as saying the root causes of the Ukraine were too complex to be resolved in one day.
Trump said Tuesday he thought that Putin wants to stop the war in Ukraine, adding if it was not for Trump then Russia would try to take the whole of Ukraine.
"If it weren't for me, I think he'd want to take over the whole country," Trump said.
Trump refused to answer a question about whether the United States would halt military aid to Ukraine if Washington walked away from talks.
Putin's decision to send tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in 2022 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.
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