“Suspicious” Trump bypasses State Department procedures to call world leaders

Donald Trump reportedly spoke this week with world leaders like Vladimir Putin without the typical oversight of the U.S. State Department and government interpreters.

The reasoning behind this, as sources explained The Washington Postis that Trump is “suspicious” of federal officials after a series of leaked transcripts of calls he made with world leaders during his first term in the White House emerged.

The post reported its “standard procedure” for new presidents to sign an agreement with the General Services Administration, which the Trump transition team has so far bypassed. officials familiar with conversations said Politico It said on Saturday that Trump’s team was expected to sign an agreement with the agency at some point, but that had not happened by the end of the weekend.

This is what an insider said post that world leaders have called Trump directly for now.

Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, said in a statement that world leaders had reached out to Trump to congratulate him and build “stronger relationships” with the president-elect.

Cheung’s statement added that the new president represents “global peace and stability,” a point Trump’s campaign regularly emphasized by pointing to the relative stability in the Middle East and Ukraine during his first term.

Trump and Putin reportedly spoke on Thursday for the first time since Trump’s comfortable election victory. Sources told Dem post that Trump, speaking from Mar-a-Lago, encouraged the longtime Russian leader not to “escalate the war in Ukraine” and reminded him “of Washington’s significant military presence” alongside him in Europe.

A central promise of Trump’s campaign was to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, but he has not spelled out how he plans to achieve that.

Among others who called Trump this week was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump’s billionaire super-supporter Elon Musk was also reportedly on the phone for that 25-minute call.

Ukrainian officials said post They had no objection to Trump calling Putin. They reportedly expected discussions to take place between the two men about the years-long war between Russia and Ukraine, in which a staggering 500,000 soldiers were killed or injured, U.S. officials announced this summer.

There have been fears in Ukraine that a Trump presidency would mean the end of most U.S. military aid to the country. However, on his call this week Axios reported that Ukrainian officials found Trump’s words “a little more reassuring” than expected.

However, Trump’s election victory has yet to lead to an immediate easing of fighting between Russia and Ukraine. A CNN report on Sunday revealed that Russian and North Korean troops had assembled “a large force numbering in the tens of thousands” to carry out an attack on Ukrainian positions in Russia’s Kursk region – an operation expected to begin in the coming days.