Kremlin says contacts with Trump team are intensifying

Adds quotes from the Kremlin and Lavrov's NATO remarks

By Dmitry Antonov and Guy Faulconbridge

MOSCOW, Feb 5 (Reuters) - Russia said on Wednesday that contacts with U.S. President Donald Trump's team were intensifying, and praised Trump for earlier remarks Moscow said amounted to an acknowledgment that it was a mistake for the West to draw Ukraine towards NATO.

Trump, who has promised to end the war in Ukraine but has not yet set out in public how he would do so, said on Tuesday the war was a bloodbath and that his team had had "some very good talks".

The Kremlin said that there had been contacts that were intensifying.

"I can say here that there are indeed contacts between individual departments, and they have intensified recently," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. "I can't tell you any other details."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in an interview released late on Tuesday that he would be prepared to sit down with Putin to achieve peace. Following his remarks, the price of Ukrainian debt rose, an indication investors see it as a potential sign of peace initiatives.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov welcomed what he described as an acknowledgment from Trump that drawing Ukraine towards NATO was a mistake.

"Suddenly, for the first time, President Trump, in one of his first speeches, criticising the position of the administration of Biden on the Ukrainian crisis, bluntly said that one of the main mistakes was drawing Ukraine into NATO," Lavrov said.

"For the first time the problem of NATO was identified as something that the United States is ready to discuss seriously," Lavrov said.

NATO opened the door to Ukrainian membership at a summit in 2008, without giving a date for Kyiv to join the alliance.

Russia has long maintained that Kyiv's aspiration to join NATO was a threat to its security and a primary reason why Putin sent troops into Ukraine in Feb. 2022. Ukraine says it needs NATO membership or comparable Western security guarantees to protect itself from Russian designs on its territory.

At a press conference in Mar-a-Lago on Jan. 7 , Trump appeared to suggest there had been a change in U.S. policy towards Ukraine and NATO during the presidency of Joe Biden, and that he sympathised with Russia's position.

"A big part of the problem is, Russia - for many, many years, long before Putin - said, 'You could never have NATO involved with Ukraine.' Now, they've said that. That's been, like, written in stone," Trump said.

"And somewhere along the line Biden said, 'No. They should be able to join NATO.' Well, then Russia has somebody right on their doorstep, and I could understand their feelings about that."