Donald Trump said a meeting between him and Russian President Vladimir Putin is being arranged.
The US president-elect did not give a timetable for when the meeting might take place.
“He wants us to meet and we're arranging it,” he said in remarks at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Russian news agency TASS quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying the US had not yet formally requested a meeting.
Trump has promised to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine soon after taking office on January 20 and expressed skepticism about US military and financial support for Kiev.
“President Putin wants us to meet,” he said Thursday.
“He even said this in public and we have to end this war. It's a bloody mess.'
Trump has nominated Keith Kellogg, a former national security adviser and retired US Army lieutenant general, to be special envoy to Ukraine and Russia for his second administration.
Kellogg lays out his ideas on how the US could end the war in research paper published by the America First Policy Institutepro-Trump think thank, last April.
He suggested that Ukraine would receive additional US aid only if it agreed to participate in peace talks with Moscow.
The paper also suggested that if Moscow refused to participate, then the US should continue its aid to Ukraine.
After Trump's election victory in November, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he believed that with Trump as president, the war would “end sooner” than it would otherwise.
He said the two had a “constructive exchange” over the phone, but did not say whether Trump had made any requests about possible talks with Russia.