The Kremlin on Monday said there has been no conversation between President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, dismissing reports of a call between the two leaders where Trump purportedly advised the Russian leader against escalating the conflict in Ukraine.
The Kremlin denied reports of a phone call between President-elect Donald Trump and Russian ... [+]
Citing unnamed sources, the Washington Post and Reuters reported Trump had talked to Putin on Thursday where the war in Ukraine was discussed and the president-elect reminded the Russian leader of “Washington’s sizable military presence in Europe.”
The Kremlin’s top spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, strongly denied the reports in a press briefing on Monday saying they were “completely untrue” and “pure fiction,” and that no conversation had taken place between the two leaders.
Peskov then mockingly said the reports reflected “the quality of the information…published nowadays…even by quite respected outlets.”
According to the Russian state-run news agency TASS, the last official phone call between Trump and Putin, which has been reported on the Kremlin’s website, took place in July 2020.
The state media also claimed the last phone call between Putin and a U.S. leader took place on February 12, 2022—just weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—when he and President Joe Biden talked for more than an hour.
The Trump campaign’s communications director, Steven Cheung, also refused to comment on the purported call and told Reuters: “We do not comment on private calls between President Trump and other world leaders.”
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Several key world leaders were quick to congratulate Trump on his electoral victory last week and many of them called him shortly after to discuss various issues including trade and the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. The list included the likes of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Chinese President Xi Jinping—with Putin’s name being conspicuously absent. But the Russian leader eventually congratulated Trump while speaking at an event in Sochi on Thursday, praising Trump’s courage in response to the first assassination attempt against him in July. “His behavior at the moment of an attempt on his life left an impression on me. He turned out to be a brave man…He manifested himself in the very correct way, bravely as a man,” Putin said. The Russian president also acknowledged Trump’s “desire to restore relations with Russia, to help end the Ukrainian crisis” and said it “deserves attention at least.”
Last month, the Kremlin issued a statement confirming a report from journalist Bob Woodward’s latest book that Trump had sent COVID-19 testing devices to Putin at the start of the pandemic in 2020. The Kremlin, however, denied Woodward’s reporting that the two leaders talked over the phone several times after Trump left office in 2021. In his book, Woodward wrote that Trump called Putin at least seven times after leaving office.
Here’s What We Know About Trump’s First Calls With World Leaders (Forbes)