President-elect Donald Trump received a letter on Friday from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who offered Trump his "warmest Christmas and New Year greetings" and urged him "to take real steps to restore the framework of bilateral cooperation."
"A very nice letter from Vladimir Putin; his thoughts are so correct," Trump said in a statement. "I hope both sides are able to live up to these thoughts, and we do not have to travel an alternate path."
In the translation, Putin wrote:
Serious global and regional challenges, which our countries have had to face in recent years, show that relations between Russia and the US remain an important factor in ensuring stability and security of the modern world. I hope that after you assume the position of the President of the United States of America, we will be able -- by acting in a constructive and pragmatic manner -- to take real steps to restore the framework of bilateral cooperation in different areas as well as bring our level of collaboration on the international scene to a qualitatively new level.
The letter comes just days after the Kremlin spokesperson publicly criticized the outgoing Obama administration. "Nearly all levels of our dialogue (with the US) has been frozen," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview Wednesday.
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