Donald Trump has announced that plans are being made for a meeting between him and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The US president-elect did not provide a specific timeline for when the meeting will occur.
“He wants to meet and we are setting it up,” he said in remarks at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Russian news agency Tass quotes Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying that the US has not yet formally requested a meeting.
Trump has promised to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine soon after he takes office on 20 January and has expressed scepticism about US military and financial support for Kyiv.
“President Putin wants to meet,” he said on Thursday.
“He has said that even publicly and we have to get that war over with. That’s a bloody mess.”
Trump has appointed Keith Kellogg, a former national security adviser and retired lieutenant-general in the US military, as special envoy to Ukraine and Russia for his second term.
Kellogg outlined his views on how the US could help end the war in a research paper published by the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank, in April of the previous year.
In the paper, he suggested that Ukraine should only receive additional US aid if it agreed to engage in peace talks with Moscow.
However, it also stated that if Moscow refused to participate, the US should continue supporting Ukraine.
After Trump’s victory in the November election, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed optimism that the war would “end sooner” under Trump’s leadership.
He mentioned having had a “constructive exchange” with Trump via phone, although he did not specify whether Trump had made any demands regarding talks with Russia.