KYIV (Reuters) – Ukraine expects high-level contact with the new U.S. administration immediately after Donald Trump takes office, including an eventual meeting between the U.S. president-elect and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Kyiv said on Friday.
Kyiv sees cultivating close ties with Trump as a paramount goal and has been making overtures to the Republican who won the U.S. presidential election in November, promising to rapidly end Russia’s nearly three-year all-out war with Ukraine.
“We are waiting for a meeting between our presidents because for us the main thing is to work together with America… we are preparing for contacts at the highest and high levels immediately after the inauguration,” Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi told reporters at a briefing in Kyiv.
Trump has expressed a willingness to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin as a step towards ending the war.
Kyiv has previously voiced opposition to Western leaders interacting with Putin, arguing that such moves legitimise a pariah and reduce the Russian leader’s isolation, but it has not spoken out against the prospect of any Trump-Putin meeting.
Trump has appointed retired lieutenant general Keith Kellogg to be his envoy on matters related to the war.
Sources told Reuters earlier this week that a fact-finding trip to Kyiv and other European capitals by Kellogg had been postponed until after Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
Tykhyi said on Friday that the visit was delayed for legal rather than political reasons, pointing to the Logan Act, which limits the ability of Americans outside the government to negotiate over U.S. disputes with foreign officials.
(Reporting by Max Hunder and Yuliia Dysa; Editing by Peter Graff, Tom Balmforth and Hugh Lawson)
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