Russian and US teams plan to meet this week to discuss improving relations after the war in Ukraine had pushed ties to the worst level since the depths of the Cold War, a senior Russian start diplomat said on Sunday.
Vladimir Putin appointed Kirill Dmitriev, the chief of Russia's sovereign wealth fund, as a special envoy on international economic and investment cooperation.
Dmitriev, 49, is an investment banker who studied at Harvard and Stanford in the 1990s and worked at US firms Goldman Sachs and McKinsey before returning to Moscow in the early 2000s.
The appointment will give Dmitriev a more formal role in the Russian negotiating team.
With Russian forces having advanced last year at the fastest rate in Ukraine since the start of the 2022 invasion, US President Donald Trump has said he wants to deliver a peace deal to end the war, which he says has killed vast numbers of people.
Trump and President Vladimir Putin spoke on February 12 about improving relations and ending the war, and US and Russian officials met in Riyadh on February 18 to that end.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, Moscow's point man for relations with the US, said that a meeting at the level of departmental heads would take place at the end of the week.
"We are open to contacts with the American side, in particular, on irritants in bilateral relations," Ryabkov was quoted as saying by state news agency TASS.
"We are waiting for real progress when the meeting scheduled for the end of the coming week takes place."
Trump has repeatedly said that he believes Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky want to do a deal.
Trump said on February 12 that it was not practical for Ukraine to get NATO alliance membership and that he had seen support for US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's statement that Ukraine will not realistically return to its 2014 borders.
Russia controls nearly one-fifth of Ukraine
As the war enters its fourth year, Russia controls nearly one-fifth of Ukraine - or an area about the size of the US state of Ohio - including Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, about 75% of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and more than 99% of the Luhansk region.
Russia says the land it controls is now Russian land under Russian law and the Russian nuclear umbrella, a position Ukraine and its Western European backers have said they will never recognize or accept.
Last June, Putin set out his terms for an end to the war: Ukraine must officially drop its NATO ambitions and withdraw troops from the entirety of the territory of the four Ukrainian regions claimed and mostly controlled by Russia.
Willing to give up presidency
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday he was willing to give up his position if it meant peace in Ukraine, quipping that he could exchange his departure for Ukraine's entry into NATO.
"If (it means) peace for Ukraine if you really need me to leave my post, I am ready," an irritated-looking Zelensky said when asked during a press conference whether he was ready to leave his post if it meant securing peace.
"I can exchange this for NATO (membership), if that condition is there, immediately," the president added.
US President Donald Trump has pushed for elections to take place in Ukraine, having branded Zelensky a "dictator," an apparent reference to the Ukrainian leader's official five-year term running out in 2024.
Trump's criticism of Zelensky came as relations between the two leaders deteriorated sharply in recent weeks.
Zelensky has opposed the idea of elections during a full-scale war, a position supported by his major domestic political opponents.
The Ukrainian president also said he wanted to see Trump as a partner to Ukraine and more than simply a mediator between Kyiv and Moscow.
"I really want it to be more than just mediation... that's not enough," he told a press conference in Kyiv.