Vladimir Putin proposed holding a referendum in war-torn eastern Ukraine when he met Donald Trump in Helsinki this week, it has been reported.

The Russian president spoke about the proposal at a behind-closed-doors meeting with ambassadors and diplomats at the foreign ministry in Moscow on Thursday, Bloomberg reported, citing two people who attended the meeting. Putin reportedly said he had agreed not to discuss the proposal publicly while Trump was considering it.

The proposal seeks to resolve the four-year-old conflict in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions that followed Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Ukraine has offered the regions autonomy under its rule.

Parts of the regions that are controlled by Russia-backed separatists – the rebel “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk – held their own referendums in May 2014 and declared independence from Ukraine. The votes were not recognised by Ukraine, the US or the EU, while Russia said it respected the results.

Bloomberg said Putin was proposing a ballot of residents on the status of the two territories, carried out under international auspices.

The referendum Putin reportedly proposed is not the same as the one held in Crimea, a source familiar with the situation told the Russian Interfax news service later on Friday.

The vote would be about territories in Eastern Ukraine controlled by separatists getting autonomy under Ukrainian rule. The proposal hasn’t been yet discussed with the leaders of rebel republics.

A spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, said on Friday that other options of resolving the conflict in Eastern Ukraine “can be discussed”, since “the international community, and the US in particular, failed to make Kiev stick to the Minsk agreements”.

White House officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment, Bloomberg reported. A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told Bloomberg that “some new ideas were discussed” in Helsinki and “they will be worked on”, but he refused to go into detail about what Putin had said about Ukraine at the summit.

At a joint press conference in Helsinki, Putin said Trump “continues to maintain” that the annexation of Crimea was illegal, and he disagreed. “We held a referendum in strict compliance with the UN charter and international legislation. For us, the case is closed,” he said.



Last month Trump appeared to leave the door open to the US recognising the annexation. “We’re going to have to see,” he said, answering a question from a reporter on 30 June.

Both Putin and Trump described their Helsinki talks as a success in public statements after the summit. Some Russian officials expressed hope that the summit was a first step towards improving Russian relations with the US.

Sergei Aksyonov, the governor of Crimea, told the Russian state-run news service RIA Novosti: “I am positive that [Putin] is doing everything in his power to [get the US to] recognise Crimea [as a Russian region] and lift the sanctions. The first step was made, let’s wait for the results now.”

Andrei Kostin, head of the state-run bank, VTB, said the “spirit” of the summit created grounds for further cooperation between the two countries. “We made the first step and we can now expect our contact to develop,” he told the state-funded Rossia 24 TV channel.

Russia’s ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, said in Moscow that the summit was a “remarkable event … the main event of the current political season”. He said: “The two presidents, as it seemed to me, talked very openly, genuinely, spoke about their concerns and tried to find common ground.”

On Thursday Trump tweeted that he was looking forward to a second meeting with Putin. The White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, said Trump had asked his national security adviser, John Bolton, to formally invite Putin to visit Washington later this year.

Moscow welcomed the invitation with enthusiasm. “It is very important to continue the dialogue,” Dmitry Novikov, a state Duma deputy told RIA Novosti on Friday. Such a meeting would be another step towards discussing and resolving problems between the two countries, he said.

Antonov echoed his sentiment. “We are all for the dialogue to be continuous and for the leaders meeting not from occasion to occasion but regularly, in order to better understand the issues and to resolve them,” Antonov said.