MOSCOW (Reuters) - German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he had agreed with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin that their countries needed to make efforts to improve badly frayed bilateral relations.

“We are far from having normal relations,” Steinmeier told reporters after a meeting with Putin in the Kremlin. “There are open wounds still, in particular resulting from the annexation of Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine that have weighed and continue to weigh on our relations.”

He said that both he and Putin were realistic about the limits to what could be achieved in a single conversation and further talks were needed to “find a way out of the negative spiral” of current relations.

“We are parting ways with the common goal of doing what we can to not only stabilize our relations but to improve them,” he said.