The Kremlin denied today that the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, and the president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, had a telephone conversation after the second’s victory in the presidential elections on November 5.
«That news is a pure invention. “It is false information,” said Dmitri Peskov, presidential spokesman, in his daily telephone press conference, alluding to the information disseminated by The Washington Post.
At the insistence of the journalists, Peskov stressed that “there was no such conversation.”
«This is the best example of the quality of information that is now sometimes published even by quite respectable media. “It has nothing to do with reality,” he said.
The Kremlin website specifies that the last telephone conversation between the two leaders took place in July 2020, before Trump left the White House.
According to the supposed exclusive, Trump and Putin would have spoken on November 7, hours before the head of the Kremlin spoke at the Valdai Debate Club, during which he congratulated the Republican candidate on his victory.
During the conversation, Trump would have recommended to Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine, after which he reminded him of the considerable military presence that the United States has in Europe.
In addition, he expressed his willingness to hold new talks to address “soon the resolution of the war in Ukraine.”
During the election campaign, Trump claimed to be able to reach an agreement within 24 hours to end the war in Ukraine, which the Kremlin considered an “exaggeration.”
Since winning Tuesday’s election, the Republican has had dozens of telephone conversations with world leaders, including one with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump conducts these telephone conversations from his Florida mansion without the participation of the State Department, since the Republican leader’s team distrusts career officials.
In addition to congratulating Trump at the Valdai Debate Club, Putin called him “brave” for behaving “like a man” in the face of the assassination attempt he suffered at an election rally last July and was “willing” to maintain contacts with the future American president.
“What he has said publicly so far (…), what was said about his desire to restore relations with Russia, to contribute to ending the Ukrainian crisis, deserves, at the very least, attention,” said the Russian president.EFE
