Putin Says Trump’s Proposals on Ukraine Deserve Attention

(Bloomberg) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Donald Trump on his victory in the US presidential election and said he’s ready to hold discussions with the new American leader.

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“It seems to me, it deserves attention what was said about the desire to restore relations with Russia, to help end the Ukrainian crisis,” Putin said late Thursday at the annual meeting of the Valdai Club in the Black Sea city of Sochi, in his first comments on Trump’s re-election. “I have always said that we will work with any head of state who has the trust of the American people.”

Putin gave no indication that Russia is ready to make concessions to secure an end to the war he started in February 2022. He’s repeatedly said he’s willing to hold talks, while insisting that any negotiations take account of the realities on the ground since his forces invaded Ukraine and occupied swathes of the country’s south and east.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said any attempt to force a quick end to Russia’s war on his country, as earlier suggested by Trump, would spell a loss for Kyiv. “It would be a tragedy to just have a fast ending of the war,” he said at a news conference in Budapest after attending a summit with European leaders on Thursday.

Trump told NBC News that Putin wasn’t among world leaders he’d spoken with since winning the election, though “I think we’ll speak.” He said he’d talked to Zelenskiy but declined to share details of their call.

Russian officials have veered between ill-disguised joy and apprehension at the prospect of a new four-year term for Trump, who has promised to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours and shown little enthusiasm for maintaining US aid to Kyiv. While he extended an olive branch to Putin during his first term following the 2016 election, his administration also imposed punishing new sanctions, including on aluminum producer Rusal and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, and expelled scores of Russian diplomats.

“Many people close to power in Moscow who understand US policy are afraid of Trump’s victory,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the consultancy R.Politik and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “You can drink a bottle of wine, dance with happiness and then get an awful hangover.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Thursday said he couldn’t rule out that Trump and Putin would talk before the US presidential inauguration, the state-run Tass news agency reported.

Trump is unpredictable, several commodities tycoons and officials from government- and state-run businesses said. None of them expect any sanctions relief, even in the unlikely event the war settles into a frozen conflict.

Others saw indirect consequences from Tuesday’s vote. Sanctioned billionaire Oleg Deripaska predicted that Trump’s election would collapse oil prices, hinting that would mean funds for fighting wars dry up. “Oil is at $50 by May, peace will be everywhere, it seems,” he said in a post on Telegram.

Trump won’t have a real understanding of what he’s dealing with, said Thomas Graham, a former top official for Russia policy at the White House who’s now at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, ahead of the election.

“Trump has some grandiose vision of himself as a peacemaker, but there is nothing to suggest that he’s thought through the specifics of this,” he said.

--With assistance from Daryna Krasnolutska.

(Updates with Ukrainian president’s comment in the fourth paragraph, Trump in the fifth.)

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