Melania Trump sends letter to Putin about abducted children

By Steve Holland

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump's wife, Melania Trump, raised the plight of children in Ukraine and Russia in a personal letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, two White House officials said on Friday.

President Trump hand-delivered the letter to Putin during their summit talks in Alaska, the officials told Reuters. Slovenian-born Melania Trump was not on the trip to Alaska.

The officials would not divulge the contents of the letter other than to say it mentioned the abductions of children resulting from the war in Ukraine.

The existence of the letter was not previously reported.

Russia's seizure of Ukrainian children has been a deeply sensitive one for Ukraine.

Ukraine has called the abductions of tens of thousands of its children taken to Russia or Russian-occupied territory without the consent of family or guardians a war crime that meets the U.N. treaty definition of genocide.

Previously Moscow has said it has been protecting vulnerable children from a war zone.

The United Nations Human Rights Office has said Russia has inflicted suffering on millions of Ukrainian children and violated their rights since its full scale invasion of Ukraine begun in 2022.

Trump and Putin met for nearly three hours at a U.S. military base in Anchorage without reaching a ceasefire deal in the war in Ukraine.

(Reporting By Steve Holland; Editing by Trevor Hunnicutt and Sam Holmes)