• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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Germany’s leader Scholz to reach out to Putin, lawmaker says

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German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz has told lawmakers that he wanted to hold renewed talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This is according to participants at a defence committee meeting in the Bundestag in Berlin.

“I heard, clearly heard that the chancellor also announced a new initiative for talks with Putin,’’ said lawmaker Wolfgang Hellmich of Scholz’s Social Democrats.

Scholz argued that there had been little point in talking to Putin ahead of his Victory Day speech on May 9.

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He noted that the conflict could not be resolved without channels for dialogue, according to Hellmich.

Scholz spoke to Putin by telephone several times after the start of the war in Ukraine on Feb. 24, but the contact then ended.

Last week, the chancellor said he had last spoken to the Russian president four weeks earlier, in comments to Stern news magazine.

That was on March 30, according to the government press office.