Norway and Finland leaders hold rare call with Putin

What the report says

Finland’s President Alexander Stubb and Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre held a rare joint phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to BBC World News. Their offices said the conversation, made from Helsinki, was meant to discuss possible future negotiations to help end Russia’s war in Ukraine. They stressed that the initiative was their own and not a message on behalf of Europe as a whole.

The call stands out because it is the first direct contact between European leaders and Putin in more than a year. Stubb and Støre said they wanted to continue diplomatic discussions from a meeting in Oslo on 20 October, and both leaders pointed to the war’s human and economic cost as well as its impact on European security. Putin, for his part, said what he called confrontational EU and NATO policies were extending the conflict.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky later spoke with the two Nordic leaders and said he appreciated their support. The BBC reported that Zelensky had met them and US special envoy Steve Witkoff in Oslo the previous week, and that the talks also touched on planned trilateral discussions involving Ukraine, Russia and the United States in Abu Dhabi in November. The report also noted that Denmark’s prime minister was skeptical of the outreach, saying it had not been coordinated with other European governments.