US President Donald Trump’s wife, Melania Trump, raised the issue of children in Ukraine and Russia in a personal letter addressed to Russian President Vladimir Putin, two White House officials confirmed on Friday.
According to the officials, President Trump hand-delivered the letter to Putin during their summit in Alaska. Melania Trump, who was born in Slovenia, did not accompany her husband on the trip.
The officials declined to provide details of the letter’s content, but confirmed it mentioned the abductions of children as a result of the war in Ukraine. The existence of the letter had not been made public until now.
The abduction of Ukrainian children has been a deeply sensitive matter for Kyiv. Ukrainian authorities have accused Russia of forcibly taking tens of thousands of children to Russia or Russian-occupied territories without family or guardian consent, describing it as a war crime that meets the UN treaty definition of genocide.
Moscow has insisted that it is protecting vulnerable children from a conflict zone.
The United Nations Human Rights Office has reported that since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, millions of Ukrainian children have suffered, with widespread violations of their rights.
President Trump and President Putin met for nearly three hours at a US military base in Anchorage but failed to reach an agreement on a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine.
Faridah Abdulkadiri
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