Putin-Trump meeting may take months to arrange, Kremlin says

Russian President Vladimir Putin is prepared to meet with US President Donald Trump, though an actual meeting may take months to set up, a Kremlin official told the TASS news agency Saturday, according to Reuters.

“This will not be in coming weeks, let’s hope for the best – that the meeting will happen in the coming months,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

But Peskov said the Russian leader would likely speak to Trump on the phone in the coming days to congratulate him.

Trump’s praise for Putin has raised expectations that he could move to normalize ties between the nations, though Trump hasn’t articulated a clear policy and some of his Cabinet nominees have made hawkish statements on Russia.

A recently declassified US intelligence report says Putin and Russia meddled in the US election to help Trump win the presidency.

The Russian efforts sought “to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” said the report from the Director of National Intelligence.

Trump has challenged the claims. Though he has grudgingly acknowledged that Russia was involved in hacking the Democratic Party ahead of the November elections, the president has expressed confidence that Russian efforts did not affect the outcome of the election.

US spy chiefs have informed Trump that Russian operatives claim to possess deeply compromising personal and financial information about him, according to American media reports.

Media outlet Buzzfeed has published, without corroborating its contents, a 35-page dossier of memos on which the assessment is ostensibly based, which had been circulating in Washington for months.

The memos describe sex videos involving prostitutes filmed during a 2013 visit by Trump to a luxury Moscow hotel, supposedly as a potential means for Russia to blackmail him.

They also suggest Russian officials proposed lucrative deals in order to win influence over the Republican real estate magnate.

The dossier was originally compiled by a former British MI6 intelligence operative hired by other US presidential contenders to do political “opposition research” on Trump in the middle of last year, according to CNN.

The classified two-page synopsis also included allegations that there was a regular flow of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and Russian government intermediaries.

Trump has called the dossier “phony” and said it is part of a “witch hunt” against him.

Trump has repeatedly dismissed the conclusion that Moscow influenced the election, while calling for a push to mend bilateral relations deeply strained during the Obama presidency.

He recently condemned as “stupid” anyone opposing better relations with Moscow.

AFP and AP contributed to this report.