Melania and Donald Trump met Putin in Finland in 2018.Kremlin Pool/Planet Pix/ZUMA
First Lady Melania Trump tends to be seen more often than she is heard. But when she does speak, it’s often hard to forget.
Take, for example, her infamous profanity-laden tirade against having to decorate the White House for Christmas, per tradition, and criticism for being “complicit” in the policy of separating immigrant families during her husband’s first term. Or her bizarre and baseless video from last year in which, while trying to hawk her memoir, she implied that conspiratorial forces were at work in the first attempted assassination of President Donald Trump, in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Now, she has granted us another puzzling message—this time in epistolary form. In a letter first published by Fox News on Saturday, the First Lady wrote to Russian President Vladimir Putin begging him to protect unnamed “children”—without specifying which children or what, exactly, she wants Putin to do to support them. The letter seems to be concerned with Ukrainian children—but never acknowledges the litany of indignities that they have suffered since Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
More than 600 Ukrainian children have been killed and more than 1,800 have been injured from the start of the war through last December, according to a report released earlier this year by the UN Human Rights Office. In addition, in 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, alleging that they committed war crimes by kidnapping Ukrainian children and deporting them to Russia. The UN report says officials verified that, in the first year after Russia’s invasion, “at least 200 children, including many living in institutions, were transferred within occupied territory or to the Russian Federation.” Other entities have said the numbers are far higher: The Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale University estimated that more than 35,000 Ukrainian kids were taken, and Ukraine’s human rights commissioner has said Russia took more than 19,500 Ukrainian kids of whom only about 1,000 have been returned.
This context, though, was absent from the First Lady’s letter. That’s especially bizarre given that the president has told the press that Melania Trump has been disturbed by the war. “I go home, tell the First Lady, ‘I spoke to Vladimir today, we had a wonderful conversation.’ She says, ‘Oh really? Another city was just hit,’” President Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last month.
“Dear President Putin,” the First Lady’s letter begins, “Every child shares the same quiet dreams in their heart, whether born randomly into a nation’s rustic countryside or a magnificent city-center. They dream of love, possibility, and safety from danger.” The president reportedly hand-delivered the letter to Putin prior to their Friday summit in Anchorage, Alaska, according to Fox.
The letter, which Melania Trump also posted on her social media accounts Saturday night, proceeds to state that parents have a “duty to nurture the next generation’s hope” and that leaders have a “responsibility to sustain our children.”
“A simple yet profound concept, Mr. Putin, as I am sure you agree, is that each generation’s descendants begin their lives with a purity—an innocence which stands above geography, government, and ideology,” the letter continues. “Yet in today’s world, some children are forced to carry a quiet laughter, untouched by the darkness around them—a silent defiance against the forces that can potentially claim their future. Mr. Putin, you can singlehandedly restore their melodic laughter.”
“In protecting the innocence of these children, you will do more than serve Russia alone—you serve humanity itself,” the letter says.
“Such a bold idea transcends all human division, and you, Mr. Putin, are fit to implement this vision with a stroke of the pen today. It is time,” it concludes.
If you are not sure what, exactly, any of this is supposed to mean, you are not alone. On social media, some reactions to the letter included claims that it was “vapid,” “word salad,” and potentially written by artificial intelligence. Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones on Sunday about the letter’s lack of specifics and whether AI was used in its writing.
But even if Melania Trump had asked Putin for a ceasefire in the letter, or outlined what most disturbs her about the war’s impacts on Ukrainian children, it’s highly unlikely that would have moved the needle. As my colleague Ruth Murai outlined yesterday, the Friday summit was ultimately a win for Russia: The president called it “great and very successful” while backtracking on the idea of pursuing an immediate ceasefire. Russian state media, meanwhile, reportedly gleefully replayed clips of the two men meeting, contrasting it with the president’s dressing-down of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office earlier this year.
If anything, the letter proves that both Donald and Melania Trump share an arrogant certainty that they can stop Russia’s more than three-year-long war on Ukraine: He, through the summit in Alaska (after his campaign trail pledge to end the war within 24 hours failed); she, through a letter that would make ChatGPT proud.