Envoys from US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin said their meeting in Davos on a possible future peace deal to end the war in Ukraine was "very positive" and "constructive".
The United States has been holding talks with Russia, and separately with Kiev and European leaders, on proposals to end the war in Ukraine, but no agreement has yet been reached, despite Trump's repeated promises to quickly conclude an agreement, Reuters reports.
Ukraine's European allies, currently at odds over Trump's threats regarding Greenland, are concerned that the United States could demand that Ukraine accept territorial concessions.
"The dialogue is constructive and more and more people understand the fairness of Russia's position," Putin's envoy Kirill Dmitriev said after talks with Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner at the USA House in Davos.
Vitkoff said: "We had a very positive meeting," the Russian news agency RIA (RIA) reported.
The meeting lasted two hours, a source who spoke on condition of anonymity told Reuters.
At stake is how to end Europe's deadliest war since World War II, the future of Ukraine, the extent to which European powers have been sidelined, and whether a peace deal brokered by the United States could last.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine, sparking the biggest conflict between Moscow and the West since the most tense days of the Cold War.
Russia controls about 19 percent of Ukraine's territory, including the Crimea peninsula, which it annexed in 2014, as well as most of the eastern Donbas region, large parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions, and smaller parts of four other regions, Reuters reminds.
Russia claims that Crimea, Donbas, Kherson and Zaporozhye are now part of Russia. Ukraine says it will never accept this, and almost all countries consider these areas to be part of Ukraine.
Ukraine and European leaders say Russia must not be allowed to pursue its goals after what they describe as an imperial "land grab." If Russia wins, European powers say, it will one day attack NATO. Moscow says such claims are nonsense and that it has no intention of attacking a NATO member.
Russia claims that European leaders are determined to obstruct peace talks by imposing conditions they know will be unacceptable to Russia, which during 2025 occupied between 12 and 17 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory daily.
Putin presents the war as a turning point in relations with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, by expanding NATO and encroaching on what he sees as Moscow's sphere of influence.
He has repeatedly said that he is open to peace, but peace based on the realities on the battlefield.
The United States estimates that a total of about one million Russian and Ukrainian men were killed or wounded in the war. Russia and Ukraine do not release casualty figures.
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