By PAUL SONNE NYTimes News Service
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BERLIN — The Kremlin confirmed Wednesday it had established contact with the Trump administration, as discussions begin about the possibility of holding peace talks to end the war in Ukraine.

“There are indeed contacts between individual departments, and they have intensified recently, but I cannot tell you any other details,” Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for Russian President Vladimir Putin, said during a call with reporters.

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Peskov had been asked about the status of negotiations after President Donald Trump, during a joint news conference Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said his administration was already having “very constructive talks on Ukraine.”

“And we are talking to the Russians. We are talking to the Ukrainians,” said Trump, who campaigned on bringing a quick end to the war that has lasted for nearly three years.

Putin’s forces reeled on the battlefield in the year after his invasion, but Russia has since recovered and put Ukraine on the back foot, taking hundreds of miles of Ukrainian territory last year, albeit at great cost. Ukraine, with a population significantly smaller than that of Russia, has struggled to put sufficient personnel on the battlefield.

In recent weeks, Putin has stepped up his attempts to undermine Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, repeating his argument that the Ukrainian leader is no longer legitimate, a contention Ukraine rejects. Zelenskyy’s presidential term expired last year, but Ukrainian law prohibits elections from being held during times of martial law.

Peskov said Wednesday that, nevertheless, Russia “remains open to negotiations.”

The last time Russia and Ukraine held peace talks to end the war, in 2022, they fell apart over key disagreements. Russia has long sought to negotiate directly with the United States and cut out Ukraine, and its questioning of Zelenskyy’s legitimacy could be designed to undercut the Ukrainian leader’s authority in the eyes of the new U.S. administration and strike a deal without him.

Trump, who has long been critical of U.S. aid to Ukraine, said this week that he wanted Ukraine to supply the United States with rare earth minerals in exchange for supporting the Ukrainian war effort.

Peskov seized upon those comments to paint Ukraine’s support from the United States as flimsy, saying such a deal would be “a proposal to buy help.”

As the possibility of peace talks increases, Putin has been flattering Trump, agreeing publicly with the president that he would not have invaded Ukraine had Trump won a second term in the 2020 election.

The Russian leader has also said that Trump will “restore order” in Europe and praised him for his persistence and character as the U.S. president threatened European allies, as well as Mexico and Canada, with punishing tariffs.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.