Kremlin declines to predict when Putin and Trump may meet face-to-face

ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) -The Kremlin said on Friday it could not predict whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would meet U.S. President Donald Trump this year given how turbulent the world had become.

The Kremlin has repeatedly said that Putin is open to an in-person meeting with Trump, but that the process of setting one up is complex and first requires lengthy preparation at expert level.

Trump and Putin have held five phone calls this year, most recently on Saturday, according to public statements from the two sides.

When asked about the probability of the two leaders meeting face-to-face sometime this year, Peskov told reporters: "I wouldn't venture to make such predictions."

"We live in such a turbulent world that it is impossible to make forecasts even for next week," he said, in an apparent reference to the Israel-Iran conflict.

After returning to the White House in January, Trump initially took a softer stance towards Moscow, but in recent months he has grown increasingly frustrated that his push to bring about an end to the war in Ukraine has thus far yielded scant results.

Russia said on Monday that the United States had cancelled the next round of bilateral talks on removing "irritants" between the two countries.

Peskov said on Friday that Moscow was in constant dialogue with the U.S. about a possible peace settlement for Ukraine, but that a separate track of talks on trying to repair bilateral ties was complex because so many problems had accumulated over the years.

He said that U.S. diplomats wanted to link the two sets of negotiations, but that Moscow believed removing "irritants' in bilateral ties would help efforts to make progress on Ukraine.

"We hope that in the foreseeable future we will reach agreement on new dates (for a new round of talks on bilateral issues)," said Peskov.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge and Dmitry Antonov; Writing by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Andrew Osborn)

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