ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, June 5 (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin held a one-on-one meeting with former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, \u200cwhich was “good and friendly,” Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov was quoted \u200cas saying on Friday by Russian news agencies.<\/p>\n
“The discussion was friendly. It was in \u200bthe form of a tete-a-tete, one on one,” the agencies quoted Ushakov as saying. “I honestly don’t know any of the details. It took place in Moscow, in the Kremlin.”<\/p>\n
In his comments to journalists, Ushakov said Russian \u200cofficials were engaged in \u2060numerous informal contacts.<\/p>\n
“I can well imagine that there are a lot of informal contacts and we simply don’t \u2060know about them,” the agencies quoted him as saying.<\/p>\n
Schroeder was German Chancellor from 1998 to 2005, when his Social Democratic Party was voted out of \u200boffice.<\/p>\n
He \u200bsubsequently worked for Russian state companies \u200band cultivated a close relationship \u200cwith Putin.<\/p>\n
Putin last month suggested that he would be willing to negotiate new security arrangements for Europe, with Schroeder as his preferred partner.<\/p>\n
But European Union foreign ministers at a meeting in Brussels rejected any role for Schroeder, with the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas saying \u200cthat would allow the former chancellor to “be \u200bsitting on both sides of the table”.<\/p>\n
Ushakov \u200bsaid he made no public \u200bstatements about his own informal contacts, including with \u200cthe special U.S. envoys dealing with \u200bthe conflict in \u200bUkraine – Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law.<\/p>\n
He noted that U.S. diplomacy was focused on events in Iran, but said \u200ba forthcoming visit \u200cby Witkoff and Kushner to Moscow was “being prepared, but the \u200bdates have not been agreed.”<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Andrew \u200bHeavens, Ron Popeski and Sanjeev Miglani)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, June 5 (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin held a one-on-one meeting with former German…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1007968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5310],"tags":[2000,299,273302,15439,1824,129858,660,7743,333,26830],"class_list":["post-1007967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-gerhard-schroeder","tag-german-chancellor","tag-germany","tag-jared-kushner","tag-kremlin","tag-meeting","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-yuri-ushakov"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1007967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1007968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1007967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1007967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1007967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}