U.S. President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin recently spoke on the phone, a conversation in which they “discussed working together to resolve the very dangerous situation in North Korea,” according to the White House.
The conversation occurred after the Russian president accused the United States of provoking North Korea and urged both sides during his annual end-of-year press conference to resolve the situation.
“We don’t recognize North Korea as a nuclear state, we think that all the things happening there are counterproductive,” declared Putin, according to Real Clear Politics.
The Russian leader reportedly added:
Both sides should stop escalating the situation, so we heard from the U.S. that they would stop military drills [with South Korea]. No, they have another military exercise, and North Korea responded by launching another missile.
You have to stop at a certain point, you have to stop this from spiraling. This is extremely dangerous.
The Kremlin acknowledged that Trump and Putin had discussed in a phone call Thursday how to counteract the North Korean nuclear threat, noting that the conversation came “at the initiative of the American side.”
In a conference call Friday, Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, said Trump and Putin discussed how to bring North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un to the negotiation table to discuss denuclearization and how to improve U.S.-Russia communications.
North Korea’s murderous leader has refused to end his country’s nuclear weapons program.
In a statement announcing the phone call between Trump and Putin, the Kremlin also said the two leaders discussed “current issues on the bilateral agenda, as well as the situation in crisis areas in the world, primarily the Korean nuclear issue.”
During his press conference, President Putin praised Trump for making some “major achievements” since he took office.
“There’s been some major achievements in this short amount of time. … Look at the markets, the markets are up pretty strongly,” noted the Russian leader. “That means that investors trust the American economy, that means they have a lot of confidence in it.”
On Thursday, the White House issued a readout of the phone conversation between the two leaders, saying, “President Trump thanked President Putin for acknowledging America’s strong economic performance in his annual press conference.”
“The two presidents also discussed working together to resolve the very dangerous situation in North Korea,” added the White House.
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