President Donald Trump hand-delivered a letter from his wife, Melania, to Russian President Vladimir Putin during the peace summit in Alaska.
White House officials revealed that the note voiced concerns over reports of children being forcibly removed from occupied Ukrainian territories, the New York Post reported.
Russian forces have abducted tens of thousands of Ukrainian children since the launch of Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, with many of them later adopted by Russian families or placed in detention camps.
Melania Trump is a native of Slovenia, a former communist country in Southern Europe that has maintained hostile relations with Russia over the Kremlin’s ongoing invasion. Her recent letter is not the first time she has interceded on Ukraine’s behalf.
The first lady helped convince Trump to increase military support for Ukraine and that Putin has not negotiated in good faith.
“I go home, I tell the first lady, ‘You know, I spoke to Vladimir today. We had a wonderful conversation,’” Trump said at a press conference in July. “She said, ‘Oh, really? Another [Ukrainian] city was just hit.’”
The Kremlin claims it has taken Ukrainian children to protect them from the conflict. The International Criminal Court (ICC), meanwhile, has indicted Putin and Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, for allegedly violating the Geneva Conventions.
The United States is not a signatory to the ICC. Unlike the court’s 124 member countries, it is therefore not obligated to arrest the Russian president if he sets foot on American soil.
Ahead of the summit in Alaska, Trump had expressed optimism about securing a ceasefire between the warring Eastern European countries.
“I think we’re pretty close to a deal,” Trump told reporters.
In the end, no formal arrangement was reached. Trump and Putin took no questions at their subsequent press conference, which lasted a matter of minutes, with critics warning Putin had successfully used the meeting as a means of stalling further U.S. sanctions over the conflict and that its highly ceremonial optics had only served to legitimize the Russian president’s standing on the world stage.
The summit comes after a disastrous meeting between Special Envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Putin on Wednesday, where Witkoff mistook the Russian president’s proposal for Ukraine’s “peaceful withdrawal” from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as a proposed concession for Russia to pull back its troops in the regions.
