Donald Trump has said that a meeting is being set up between him and Vladimir Putin to end the “bloody mess” of the war in Ukraine.

“He wants to meet, and we are setting it up,” the president-elect said outside his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida late on Thursday amid growing expectation of a US-brokered peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow.

“[Putin’s] said that even publicly, and we have to get that war over with, that’s a bloody mess,” he added, saying he would wait until after his inauguration on Jan 20 to meet the Russian leader.

Responding on Friday, Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, clarified there had been no formal requests for a meeting by the Trump camp, but that Putin would “welcome” such an approach and was “ready” for dialogue with Washington.