Russian President Vladimir Putin said the 2022 "crisis in Ukraine" might never have happened if Donald Trump had been US president at the time, AFP reported on January 24.

"I cannot but agree with him that if he had been president -- if his victory hadn't been stolen in 2020 -- then maybe there would not have been the crisis in Ukraine that emerged in 2022," Putin told a state TV reporter as cited by AFP, clearly playing to Trump's ego. 

Since Trump’s inauguration on January 20, Putin has sent several signals that he is ready to open negotiation with the new American president on bring the war to an end that will go into its third year next month.

Putin congratulated Trump on his inauguration in televised comments just before the ceremony began. He has also said in the last days that he is open to restarting arms control talks. For his part, Trump has reciprocated telling his staff to organize a personal meeting “as soon as possible.”

“I want to meet with Putin soon to end this war. Kyiv is ready to make a deal.” He also warned Russia against further delays in negotiating, threatening heightened tariffs and sanctions on Russian exports to the United States.

After claiming that he would bring the war in Ukraine to an end on his “first day in office” now that he is the actual commander in chief, Trump took the more pragmatic tack of ordering Marco Rubio, the new Secretary of State within the first hundreds of his current term.

Putin has said several times that he is willing to meet Trump, but that the same time is refusing to negotiate with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and resolving the conflict in talks Zelenskiy is “impossible,” since he "has forbidden himself" to negotiate with Russia, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the same day.

In October 2022, Zelensky signed a decree banning himself from direct contact with Russia while Putin is its president. The Kremlin has also questioned Zelenskiy legitimacy after his presidential term in office officially expired last May. The Kremlin claim the Ukrainian constitution demands the Speaker of Rada, Ruslan Stefanchuk, is the legitimate leader of Ukraine and should have taken over.

“Listen, Putin is ready. We are waiting for signals. Everyone is ready,” Peskov said at a press briefing. He refrained from speculating on the timing of a potential meeting and assured that any updates would be communicated promptly.

Russia should have many areas of common interest with the US, including stability, economic prosperity, and energy, Putin said in an interview with Pavel Zarubin, the author and host of a popular commentary program on Rossiya TV station, broadcast on January 24.

"In general, we, of course, can have many areas of common interest with the current administration, a search for solutions to key issues of today. These are strategic stability, these are economic issues, by the way," Putin said. Kremlin.

In a bid to tempt Trump into talks the Kremlin has also said it is willing to open talks on nuclear arms reduction, something that Trump has also said he hopes to achieve. Russia and the US should resume nuclear disarmament talks as soon as possible, Peskov added during his press briefing.

In response to a question about whether Russia is ready to discuss the reduction of nuclear arsenals, Peskov cited Russian President Vladimir Putin as saying that Russia considers it necessary to resume disarmament negotiations as soon as possible.

If Trump agrees, then the start of his presidency would echo that of outgoing US President Joe Biden who signed off on the renewal of the START missile treaty in January 2021 during his first week in office, a major pillar of the Cold War security infrastructure and the first of those arms deals to be renewed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

On January 23, Trump, speaking online at the World Economic Forum in Davos, floated the idea of ​​working with China and Russia to reduce their nuclear arsenal by concluding a deal. Trump added that he believed that “President Putin did support the idea of ​​significant reductions in nuclear weapons.”

But any talks will be very difficult as despite a warming of the rhetoric, the two sides remains very far apart in their basic positions. In recent comments Putin said that Russia’s main demand, that Ukraine return to the neutrality that was enshrined in its Constitution until 2014 was non-negotiable.

Previously, during the early peace talks in 2022 the Ukrainian delegation conceded that Ukraine was prepared to give up its Nato ambitions but Zelenskiy’s position has since hardened in lieu of Western bi-lateral security guarantees that commit its partners to military support, rather than the “security assurances” it has received so far.

Territory will be another thorny topic. Leaks from the Kremlin recently suggested that there was “limited wiggle room” on territory, but Putin has repeatedly said publicly that Bankova (Ukraine’s equivalent of the Kremlin) would have to take “realities on the ground” into account – widely interpreted as meaning that Russia intends to hang on to the territory it has occupied.

Putin also said that there must be a significant de-militarisation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) that was also almost agreed during the Istanbul peace deal in April 2022. However, again, Zelenskiy’s position has hardened following the rejection of the victory plan he touted in international capitals at the end of last year and last week said he would “not play those games”. Without Western security guarantees “the only security Ukraine has is our army.”

But the biggest obstacle is that neither Putin nor Trump appear to be willing to invite Zelenskiy to the talks. The Biden administration said repeated that Bankova has the final say on any peace deal and there can be no agreement without Ukraine’s participation. However, the Kremlin has from the beginning of the clash made it clear it sees Bankova as a mere US proxy and the real power in the room is Washington. The first round of diplomatic negotiations held in January 2022 in the run up to the start of the war were between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov in Geneva without Ukraine’s participation.

Bankova warned on January 24 that there could be no ceasefire talks without Kyiv’s participation, after Putin said he was ready to start negotiations.

"[Putin] wants to negotiate the fate of Europe -- without Europe. And he wants to talk about Ukraine without Ukraine," the head of Ukraine's presidential office Andriy Yermak said on Telegram.

"This is not going to happen. Putin needs to come back to reality, or he will be brought back. This is not how it works in the modern world."