Peace won't come as fast as US wants, Kremlin says Vladimir Putin is open to peace and intense work is under way to achieve it, but a solution will not come as fast as the US wants it to, the Kremlin has said. When asked by Sky's Moscow correspondent Ivor Bennett about US efforts to mediate the peace, spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the conflict was so complicated that the quick progress the White House wants would be difficult to achieve. "We understand that Washington is willing to achieve a quick success in this process, but at the same time we hope for understanding that the settlement of the Ukrainian crisis is too complicated [a process] to be done overnight, there are lots of details and lots of small things that need to be tackled before the settlement," he said. Peskov also said Moscow must achieve its aims in Ukraine, but also - apparently in contradiction with that claim - said Russia was ready to have direct negotiations with Kyiv over ending the war. He added that any settlement had to be made with Ukraine and not the US, although he said Moscow is grateful to the Trump administration for its efforts to secure peace, according to Russian state media outlet TASS. "A peace deal should be done with Ukraine and not with America. America is trying to mediate and we are grateful... a couple of days ago President Putin renewed his readiness for direct negotiations with the Ukrainians without any initial conditions. This readiness is still active," he said, adding that Kyiv has not responded. As we reported in our last post, US secretary of state Marco Rubio has said Washington would walk away from peace talks unless progress is made. Donald Trump initially said he wanted to end the war "in a day", and has since struggled to get any meaningful ceasefire commitments out of Moscow, despite Kyiv's willingness. Reports suggested he wanted peace by Easter, and his recent rhetoric has seen him turn on Putin - suggesting he may be "tapping him along". You can scroll a timeline of Trump's attempts to broker peace below...