Kremlin: Putin had 'good, friendly' tete-a-tete with former German Chancellor Schroeder

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - Russian President Vladimir Putin held a one-on-one meeting with former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, which was "good and friendly," Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov was quoted as saying on Friday by Russian news agencies.

"The discussion was friendly. It was in the form of a tete-a-tete, one on one," the agencies quoted Ushakov as saying. "I honestly don't know any of the details. It took place in Moscow, in the Kremlin."

In his comments to journalists, Ushakov said Russian officials were engaged in numerous informal contacts.

"I can well imagine that there are a lot of informal contacts and we simply don't know about them," the agencies quoted him as saying.

Schroeder was German Chancellor from 1998 to 2005, when his Social Democratic Party was voted out of office.

He subsequently worked for Russian state companies and cultivated a close relationship with Putin.

Putin last month suggested that he would be willing to negotiate new security arrangements for Europe, with Schroeder as his preferred partner.

But European Union foreign ministers at a meeting in Brussels rejected any role for Schroeder, with the EU's foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas saying that would allow the former chancellor to "be sitting on both sides of the table".

Ushakov said he made no public statements about his own informal contacts, including with the special U.S. envoys dealing with the conflict in Ukraine - Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law.

He noted that U.S. diplomacy was focused on events in Iran, but said a forthcoming visit by Witkoff and Kushner to Moscow was "being prepared, but the dates have not been agreed."

(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Ron Popeski and Sanjeev Miglani)