- Summary- Putin: 'Trust almost at zero'- Putin accuses West of betrayal over 2014/15 Minsk agreements- U.S.-Russia intelligence contacts continue, howeverLONDON, Dec 9 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that Russia's near-total loss of trust in the West would make an eventual settlement over Ukraine much harder to reach, although contacts between Russian and U.S. intelligence services were at least continuing.Since suffering a series of battlefield reverses, Putin has increasingly cast his more than nine-month-old invasion of Ukraine as a fight to defend Russia against an aggressive "collective West".At a news conference in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, Putin bemoaned the failure to implement the Minsk agreements - ceasefire and constitutional reform deals between Kyiv and Russian-backed separatist forces in eastern Ukraine brokered in 2014 and 2015 by Russia, France and Germany, at the outset of the conflict with Ukraine.Putin had been asked about remarks by former German chancellor Angela Merkel, one of the agreements' sponsors, who told the Zeit magazine in an interview published on Wednesday that the 2014 agreement had been "an attempt to give Ukraine time" - which it had used to become more able to defend itself.NO WIDER THAWBoth Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov and Deputy Defence minister Sergei Ryabkov had already stressed on Friday that Thursday's release of U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner from a Russian penal colony in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout did not portend a wider thaw in poor bilateral relations."