Donald Trump has said he has spoken to Vladimir Putin about ending his invasion of Ukraine, making him the first US president to have a direct conversation with Putin since 2022.
Trump, who has long promised to end the war in Ukraine but has not yet publicly set out his plans, said last week that the war was a bloodbath and that his team had had ‘some very good talks’.
In an interview aboard Air Force One on Friday Trump coyly told the New York Post that he had ‘better not say’ how many times he and Putin had spoken over the phone.
‘[Putin] wants to see people stop dying,’ Trump told the newspaper.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the TASS state news agency that ‘many different communications are emerging’.
‘These communications are conducted through different channels,’ Peskov said when asked by TASS to comment directly on the New York Post report.
‘I personally may not know something, be unaware of something. Therefore, in this case, I can neither confirm nor deny it.’
While the invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, the broader conflict has been going on for more than a decade, after pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych was toppled in the Revolution of Dignity.
Putin sent thousands of troops into Ukraine in 2022, calling it a ‘special military operation’ to protect Russian speakers in Ukraine, and to ‘demilitarise and denazify’ the country.
He also said he wanted to protect Russia from the threat of Ukraine’s potential membership with NATO.
But Ukraine and its Western backers, led by the United States, has consistently stated that Russia’s invasion is an imperial land grab, and have long vowed to defeat Russian forces, though support from the US is teetering.
Currently, Moscow controls a chunk of Ukraine about the size of the American state of Virginia and is advancing at the fastest pace since the early days of the 2022 invasion.
