US President Joe Biden has said he would be open to a meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin “if he is actually interested in deciding that he is looking for a way to end the war”.
Speaking to reporters alongside French President Emmanuel Macron, he stressed that Mr Putin had not yet done so.
Both men emphasized that they would continue to stand against Russia’s war.
In response, the Kremlin said President Putin was open to negotiations aimed at “ensuring our interests”.
However, spokesman Dmitry Peskov told JEE News that Moscow was definitely not ready to accept the US terms: “What did President Biden actually say? He said that negotiations are possible only after Putin leaves Ukraine.”
That complicated the search for common ground for talks, he said, with the United States not recognizing “new territories” in Ukraine that Russia illegally claimed in late September.
President Macron made it clear that he had agreed with Mr Biden that he would never push the Ukrainians to make a compromise “that would not be acceptable to them”.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said on Friday that the time had come for Ukraine to work for a just peace, but that it had to come through the liberation of Kyiv, not its surrender. He told La Repubblica newspaper that the Kremlin should now give concrete signals instead of bombing the population.
Meanwhile, on a visit to Ukraine, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said there could be no peace until Russia stopped lying about what it was doing in Ukraine.
