The Washington Post previously reported that Trump had spoken with Putin after winning the U.S. election.
The Kremlin has denied that Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President-elect Donald Trump spoke in the days following Trump’s election win, disputing reports in Western media outlets.
The Washington Post first reported on Nov. 10, citing anonymous sources, that Trump and Putin had spoken in recent days. The report stated that Trump had urged Putin not to escalate the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and that the two discussed ways to end the ongoing war soon.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov altogether denied the reports.
“There was no conversation,” Peskov said in remarks published by Russia’s state-sponsored TASS news agency on Nov. 11.
“This is completely untrue; it’s pure fiction.”
The Epoch Times contacted the Trump team for comment on the reports of a post-election call but did not receive a response by publication time.
Putin officially congratulated Trump on his presidential election win last week while speaking at an international forum in Sochi, Russia.
Tass reported that Trump and Putin haven’t actually spoken since July 2020, toward the end of Trump’s first term as president, and that Putin had also wished Trump a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in 2021 in the final days of Trump’s first term.
Journalist Bob Woodward claimed, in his recently released book “War,” that Trump and Putin did speak at various points after Trump’s first term in office ended.
Trump has neither directly confirmed nor denied Woodward’s claims that he has spoken with Putin since he left office, but in an October interview with Bloomberg News, he said, “If I did, it’s a smart thing.”
Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung has called Woodward’s reporting false. Peskov has also denied the claim.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly signaled he would seek to quickly negotiate an end to the current Russia–Ukraine war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has signaled he would oppose ending the current war by ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia.
“There should be no illusion that by showing weakness or selling out some European positions or any European country’s standing, one can buy just peace. It simply doesn’t work that way. Peace is the reward only for those strong,” Zelenskyy said in a Nov. 7 address to the European Political Community Summit in Budapest, Hungary.
Zelenskyy told the Budapest summit that he’d had a “productive conversation” with Trump following the U.S. election.
“We cannot yet know what [Trump’s] actions will be. But we do hope that America will become stronger. This is the kind of America that Europe needs. And a strong Europe is what America needs, to my mind. This is the connection between allies that must be valued and cannot be lost,” Zelenskyy said.
Amid the uncertainty about Trump’s plans for Ukraine, the Biden administration has signaled that it’s working to disburse as much U.S. aid to Ukraine as possible before the transfer of power.