Just two days after winning the election victory in the United States presidential election, Donald Trump spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This was announced this Sunday by the newspaper ‘The Washington Post’, which quotes sources close to the Republican. Trump asked Putin last Thursday not to intensify the military offensive on Ukraine, one of the issues that could mark his international agenda starting in January.
This is the first conversation between the two since the election and Trump telephoned the Russian leader from his resort in Florida. The ‘Post’ sources who were present on the call assure that the Republican leader showed his interest in holding new conversations to discuss “the end of the war in Ukraine.”
Trump also reminded Putin, always according to the American newspaper’s account, of the United States military presence in Europe and asked him not to intensify his war efforts against Ukraine. The end of this conflict is one of Trump’s electoral promises, but he never revealed how he would achieve it.
The fear in Europe and among NATO allies is that Trump is willing to defend a peace agreement that requires Ukraine to cede part of its territory to Russia, a position that the EU and the US have also rejected until now. This week, the Kremlin declared that Putin’s willingness to dialogue with Trump did not imply a change in the objectives of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukrainian territory.
“The president (Putin) has never said that the objectives of the special military operation will change,” said Russian Presidency spokesman Dmitri Peskov at a press conference. “On the contrary, he has repeatedly repeated that they remain the same,” he added. Putin also congratulated the Republican on his electoral victory and declared his willingness to soon maintain contacts with the future American president, with whom he held a summit in Helsinki in mid-2018.
Trump claims that he has spoken with nearly 70 international leaders since last Tuesday, when he achieved victory in the elections that will make him the 47th president of the United States. Among those leaders is precisely the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky and businessman Elon Musk, one of his greatest supporters during the election campaign, was also present on that call.
According to the ‘Post’, these types of conversations usually occur once the winner of the elections has officially begun the transition period with his predecessor. However, Trump has not yet met with Biden or sealed the agreements that govern this process, so the calls are not monitored by the State Department or the work of translators and interpreters from the US government.
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