MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia welcomes Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s statement that Kyiv is willing to negotiate over the war, but it is not yet clear to Moscow who it might be negotiating with, the Kremlin said on Wednesday.
Zelenskiy made the statement in a letter to U.S. President Donald Trump, which Trump made public on Tuesday.
“Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer. Nobody wants peace more than the Ukrainians,” Trump said in an address to Congress while quoting from the letter.
Asked how the Kremlin viewed this, spokesman Dmitry Peskov replied: “Positively.”
But he added: “The question is who to sit down with. For now, the Ukrainian president is still legally prohibited from negotiating with the Russian side. So, overall, the approach is positive, but the nuances have not changed yet.”
Peskov was referring to a Zelenskiy decree in 2022 that ruled out negotiations with President Vladimir Putin.
(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov, writing by Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Andrew Osborn)
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