Melania Trump has affirmed that she is directly in touch with leaders of Russian President Vladimir Putin and is still working on the possibility of bringing back Ukrainian children who are in Russia at present. She makes the remarks amid a prolonged international debate about thousands of children who Ukraine allege were kidnapped out of its territory after the full-scale invasion by Russia in 2022 began.
In a short speech to reporters at the White House, Melania Trump said that the process was in progress and her sense of achieving the result was tentative at best. We are doing it and I am working on it. I want to be successful soon, said she. She did not give additional information about the nature and the extent of the talks or the people it involved on the Russian side.
A spokesperson of the East Wing affirmed these communication channels since Melania Trump had written a letter to President Putin last August. President Donald Trump personally delivered the letter in which he specifically spoke about the problem of Ukrainian children who allegedly were taken to Russia. The outreach has been active since then as stated by the spokesperson.
Since Melania Trump started advocacy on the matter, 15 Ukrainian children were brought back to Ukraine. Seven of these returns were said to have been made in December. There was no additional news on the way of negotiating the returns and the circumstances under which they were negotiable.
The Ukrainian government claims that since February 2022, no fewer than 19,000 children have been abducted out of Ukraine and transported to Russia or Russian-controlled areas without the approval of their parents or legal guardians. Russia has continuously denied such allegations primarily arguing that the transfers were carried out in order to shield children against the lively conflict and hazardous circumstances in the war zones.
The information that Melania Trump continued her work was approved by another diplomatic course of action. On Wednesday, officials of Russia and Ukraine exchanged what was termed as productive talks as part of talks on the wider conflict that were led by the US. These negotiations occurred on the background of ongoing Russian drone and missile attacks on Ukraine that have inflicted damage and killed civilians over the past few days.
The same day, Melania Trump also welcomed at the white house Keith and Aviva Siegel, Israeli American hostages who were recently released. This was not associated with her activities in relation to Ukrainian children but it was one of the few engagements she had in the second term of her husband in office.
Meanwhile, President Trump provided a separate interview to the NBC News reporter, Tom Llamas, in which he was talking about the upcoming midterm elections. He stated that he would concede the outcome of the election as long as it was an honest election and repeated earlier arguments that Democrats wanted to cheat but he did not provide concrete evidence to back up his arguments.
Altogether, the comments of Melania Trump suggested the continuation of the behind-the-scenes communication related to humanitarian issues, whereas the larger-scale processes in diplomacy and politics were still progressing once the war was going on.