Russian President Vladimir Putin “immediately” opened and read a letter from First Lady Melania Trump at an Alaska summit focused on the war in Ukraine, according to a new report.
The letter on the “plight of children in Ukraine and Russia” was hand-delivered by President Donald Trump to Putin, who read it “in front of both delegations”, Fox News reported, citing White House officials. The Independent has requested comment from the White House.
Trump met with Putin for nearly three hours Friday at a U.S. military base in Anchorage. In their first meeting in six years the two leaders discussed the war in Ukraine. Trump has pushed for peace in the region but no ceasefire deal came out of the talks.
Melania Trump, who was born in Slovenia, wrote Putin a letter that mentioned the abductions of children over the course of the war, two White House officials told Reuters. The first lady did not travel to Alaska with the U.S. delegation.
While the exact number of missing children remains unclear, the Institute for the Study of War reported in March that Ukraine verified nearly 19,500 children have been deported by Russia. But the research non-profit said: “The true figure is likely to be much higher because Russia frequently targets vulnerable children without anyone to speak for them.”
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin, accusing him of the war crimes of unlawfully deporting children and unlawfully transferring them from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the questions raised by the ICC “outrageous and unacceptable,” Reuters reported at the time. He also mentioned Russia does not recognize the jurisdiction of the court, so “any decisions of this kind are null and void” for the country.
Prior to Friday’s summit, Trump had spoken on the phone with Putin on several occasions, but it didn’t seem to move the needle on the war in Ukraine. In recent months, Trump grew more frustrated with the Russian leader, as he continued his military campaign in Ukraine.
Last month, Trump talked about the first lady reminding him of the deadly toll of Russia’s bombardments on Ukraine.
“I go home, I tell the first lady, ‘I spoke to Vladimir today, we had a wonderful conversation.’ And she says, ‘Oh really, another city was just hit,” he said from the Oval Office.
During a joint speech to reporters Friday, where neither leader took questions, Trump called his meeting with Putin “very productive.”
Later in a Fox News interview with host Sean Hannity, Trump urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was notably not invited to the summit, to “make a deal” with Putin. Trump is set to meet with Zelensky at the White House Monday.
