AP WASHINGTON

President Donald Trump on Friday said his administration has already had “very serious” discussions with Russia about its war in Ukraine and that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin could soon take “significant” action toward ending the grinding conflict.

“We will be speaking, and I think will, perhaps, do something that’ll be significant,” Trump said in an exchange with reporters in the Oval Office. “We want to end that war. That war would have not started if I was President.” Trump did not say who from his administration has been in contact with the Russians but insisted the two sides were “already talking”.

Asked if he has already spoken directly with Putin, Trump was coy: “I don’t want to say that.” Trump has said repeatedly he wouldn’t have allowed the conflict to start if he had been in office, even though he was President as fighting grew in eastern Ukraine between Kyiv’s forces and separatists backed by Moscow, ahead of Putin sending in tens of thousands of troops in 2022. Trump since returning to office has criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, saying he should have made a deal with Putin to avoid the conflict.

The President in a Fox News interview earlier in January ridiculed Zelenskyy as “talking so brave” , when Ukraine was so dependent on US aid to fight its war. “They were brave, but we gave them billions of dollars,” Trump said. In a recent interview with Russian state television, Putin praised Trump as a “clever and pragmatic man” who is focused on U.S. interests.

“We always had a business-like, pragmatic but also trusting relationship with the current U.S. president,” Putin said. “I couldn’t disagree with him that if he had been President, if they hadn’t stolen victory from him in 2020, the crisis that emerged in Ukraine in 2022 could have been avoided.”