Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump could meet as soon as next week, says the Kremlin.
The White House confirmed that Mr Trump was open to the meeting “because he wants this brutal war to end”.
An official from the White House doubted whether the meeting would take place if Mr Putin did not agree to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zenskyy.
But Mr. Trump later said that this was not the case. “I will do what I can do to stop the murders,” he said.
Asked if his deadline on Friday remained in force for Mr Putin to agree to a peace agreement, Mr. Trump said: “It will be up to him. We’ll see what he has to say.”
He added that he was “very disappointed”, but was not complicated.
The White House official had told that the US is still expected to impose sanctions on Russia on Friday, local time.
It followed a statement by Kremlin Assistant Yuri Ushakov, who said: “The suggestion of the American side reached an agreement in essence to hold a bilateral meeting at the highest level in the coming days, that is, a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
“We are now starting with concrete preparations together with our American colleagues,” he added in television remarks.
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Although a date for a top has not been established, Mr. Ushakov said that next week would be the goal, and noticed that such events took time to organize themselves.
The possible location will “be announced a little later,” he said.
He also played the possibility that Mr Zenskyy participated in the Summit meeting to discuss the end of the three-and-a-half-year invasion of Russia in Ukraine.
“In the first place, we propose to concentrate on preparing a bilateral meeting with Trump, and we think it is most important that this meeting is successful and productive,” said Ushakov.
After the announcement of the Kremlin, Mr. Zenskyy said that “there was still no public response from Russia” on where it stood on a ceasefish between the two countries.
“Ukraine is not afraid of meetings and expects the same brave approach from the Russian side,” he said, referring to a meeting between him and Mr Putin.
The Ukrainian president spent Thursday in virtual meetings with a number of European leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission.
A personal meeting between Mr Putin and Mr. Trump would be their first because the Republican President returned to the office this year.
It would be an important milestone in the war, although there was no promise that such a meeting would lead to the end of the fighting, because Russia and Ukraine remain far apart for their demands.
Professor of Russian politics at Kings College in London, Sam Greene, said on Thursday with ABC’s The World and said that the meeting looked like it could be a “compromise solution”.
He said that one of the most important questions that people would ask was the extent in which Mr Trump was frustrated by Mr Putin.
“We have now seen Trump more than a month directly about his level of frustration with Putin,” he said.
“It would be surprising or not at all beyond the possibility that they lead to something real,” he added.
Western officials have repeatedly accused Mr Putin of holding time in peace negotiations to give Russian troops the time to conquer more Ukrainian country.
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Mr Putin has not offered any concessions in the past and will only accept an arrangement on his conditions.
Support for continuing the fight is decreasing in Ukraine
A new Gallup survey published on Thursday showed that Ukrainians were increasingly enthusiastic about a scheme that puts an end to the fight against Russia’s invasion.
The enthusiasm for a negotiated deal is a sharp reversal from 2022-the years that the war started to discover that about three-quarters of the Ukrainians wanted to continue to fight.
Now only about a quarter stop that position, with support for the continuation of the war that is steadily falling in all regions and demographic groups.
The findings were based on samples of 1,000 or more respondents aged 15 and older in life in Ukraine. Some areas under deep -rooted Russian control, which represent about 10 percent of the population, were excluded from surveys after 2022 due to lack of access.
Since the start of the entire war, the relentless bumps of Russia of urban areas behind the front line have killed more than 12,000 Ukrainian citizens, according to the United Nations.
On the front line of 1,000 kilometers, swing from northeast to southeastern Ukraine, where tens of thousands of troops have died on both sides, the larger army of Russia is slowly conquering more land.
ABC/wires
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