Donald Trump has said that a meeting is being arranged between himself and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The US president-elect gave no timeline for when the meeting might take place.
“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 nominated Keith Kellogg, a former national security adviser and retired lieutenant-general in the US military, to be special envoy to Ukraine and Russia for his second administration.
Kellogg set out his ideas for how the US could bring about an end to the war in a research paper published by the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think thank, in April last year.
He proposed that Ukraine should only get further US aid if it agreed to participate in peace talks with Moscow.
The paper also suggested, however, that if Moscow refused to take part then the US should continue its aid to Ukraine.
Following Trump’s election win in November, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he believed that, with Trump as president, the war would “end sooner” than it otherwise would have.
He said the two had had a “constructive exchange” by phone, though did not say whether Trump had made any demands regarding possible talks with Russia.
North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of US politics in his twice weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.
