Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was received in Moscow yesterday by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. “Yes, they met—it was a good conversation,” the Putin spokesman Yuri Ushakov said, in response to a question from journalists, according to the Russian news agency Interfax. Ushakov added that he could not comment on the content of the discussion because it had been a “private conversation.”
He did not answer the follow-up question about whether prospects for negotiations between Russia and the EU had also been discussed. The conversation was “friendly,” was all that was said. Putin has recently said if a European politician were chosen for talks with him on Ukraine, he would personally prefer Schroeder.
