Kremlin Says It Hopes White House Doesn’t Release Putin-Trump Calls

(Bloomberg) -- Russia hopes the U.S. doesn’t release transcripts of President Donald Trump’s conversations with Vladimir Putin as it did this week with his talks with the Ukrainian leader, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday.

“We would like to hope that things won’t come to such situations in our bilateral relations, which already have plenty of quite serious problems,” Peskov told a conference call when asked for the Kremlin’s reaction to the U.S. decision to release the transcript of the call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

“This is a rather unusual practice,” Peskov said. “As a rule, the materials from conversations on the level of the head of state are considered secret or top secret.”

He declined to comment on the controversy around the Trump-Zelenskiy conversation, which has triggered a new drive in the U.S. Congress to impeach Trump. The White House has also been accused of seeking to limit access to records of conversations between the U.S. and Russian leaders.

To contact the reporters on this story: Ilya Arkhipov in Moscow at iarkhipov@bloomberg.net;Andrey Biryukov in Moscow at abiryukov5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Gregory L. White at gwhite64@bloomberg.net, Tony Halpin

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