US first lady Melania Trump said on Friday she had secured the release of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia after establishing an extraordinary back channel of communication with President Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n
In a rare public announcement at the White House, she revealed weeks of behind the scenes diplomacy with the Kremlin chief after he held a summit in Alaska with her husband, US President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
Eight children displaced by Moscow\u2019s 2022 invasion of Ukraine had been returned to their homes in the last 24 hours, she said.<\/p>\n
The 55-year-old said that Putin had agreed to help after she passed him a letter through Trump at the summit, a meeting which otherwise ended without a breakthrough in resolving the war now in its fourth year.<\/p>\n
\u201cMuch has unfolded since President Putin received my letter last August. He responded in writing signalling a willingness to engage with me directly and outlining details regarding the Ukrainian children residing in Russia,\u201d she told reporters.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince then, President Putin and I have had an open channel of communication regarding the welfare of these children.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US first lady Melania Trump said on Friday she had secured the release of Ukrainian children abducted by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215565,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[3292,23,7676,12,2808,60831,86484,7931,122193,7182,7933,2005,3,95457,122194,1206,1208,122195,21,19,22,20,25,24,3123],"class_list":["post-215564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-alaska","tag-america","tag-britain","tag-donald-trump","tag-florida","tag-international-criminal-court","tag-january","tag-kyiv","tag-maria-lvova-belova","tag-melania-trump","tag-moscow","tag-new-york","tag-news","tag-president-vladimir-putin","tag-princess-catherine","tag-russia","tag-ukraine","tag-ukrainian-children","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215564\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}