Melania Trump, the wife of US President Donald Trump, has raised the issue of the plight of children in Ukraine and Russia in a personal letter to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Reuters reports, citing two White House officials.
President Trump delivered the letter to Putin personally during their talks at the Alaska summit, officials told Reuters. Melania Trump, who was born in Slovenia, was not on the trip to the Alaska summit.
Officials did not reveal the contents of the letter except to say it mentioned child abductions as a result of the war in Ukraine.
The existence of the letter had not been previously reported. The abduction of Ukrainian children by Russia has been a deeply sensitive issue for Ukraine.
Ukraine has called the abductions of tens of thousands of its children taken to Russia or territory occupied by Moscow without the consent of their families or guardians a war crime that meets the UN treaty definition of genocide.
Previously, Moscow has said it was protecting vulnerable children from a war zone.
The United Nations Human Rights Office has said that Russia has caused suffering to millions of Ukrainian children and violated their rights since the start of its full-scale occupation of Ukraine in 2022.
Trump and Putin met for nearly three hours at a US military base in Anchorage, without reaching a ceasefire agreement in the war in Ukraine.
