Trolling Russia “Hopes” White House Refrains From Releasing Putin-Trump Calls

With Democrats going all-in with a rare impeachment process — for the fourth time ever in American history — it appears Moscow couldn’t resist the opportunity to troll, while also perhaps legitimately slamming what is a deeply unusual practice in foreign relations. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office is said to be bristling over the “embarrassing” release the Trump call transcript — which of course means Kremlin officials have grabbed the popcorn to sit back and enjoy the show. 

“The Kremlin says it hopes the US will not release the transcripts of Vladimir Putin’s phone calls with Donald Trump after a whistleblower claimed the White House was hiding records of the US president’s phone conversations with foreign leaders,” FT reports from Moscow.

Spokesman for President Putin’s office, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters on Friday that Russia “would of course like to hope that we won’t get to that kind of situation in our bilateral relations, which are already full of extremely serious problems.”

“This practice is fairly unusual; as a rule, materials from conversations between world leaders are usually classified secret or top secret and not published,” he said, according to an Interfax report cited in FT. 

Meanwhile Politico reported Thursday that “The White House annoyed and embarrassed Ukraine’s president by releasing his comments in a private conversation with President Donald Trump — and may have violated the Ukrainian constitution.”

Zelenskiy said in the aftermath of the transcript’s release, which he may or may not have been warned about shortly ahead of time: “I think such things, such conversations between heads of independent states, they shouldn’t be published,” according to Politico.

Media commentators fairly unanimously mocked what appeared to be the Ukrainian president’s seeming attitude of abject groveling and fawning over Trump — something which would have likely remained more hidden if he knew the whole world would later see his words.