Norway and Finland leaders hold rare call with Putin

Norway and Finland leaders hold rare call with Putin

Norway and Finland say they are not acting on behalf of other European leaders

Finland’s President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre have held a joint call with Vladimir Putin, marking a rare contact between the Russian president and European leaders.

Their offices said the purpose was to look at “future negotiations to help to end the war” in Ukraine. They added that their move was not on behalf of “Europe as a whole”.

Following the call, Putin said “confrontational” EU and Nato policies were extending the war, which began when Russia launched a full-scale invasion in 2022.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke with the two Nordic leaders after their conversation with Putin. Last week, Zelensky also met them, along with US special envoy Steve Witkoff, in Oslo.

The Ukrainian leader said he was thankful for the “active support” of his Finnish and Norwegian counterparts.

Tuesday’s phone call took place from the Finnish capital, Helsinki.

“Finland and Norway border Russia,” Stubb and Støre said. They said they had initiated the call to “discuss Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the diplomatic efforts to end the war and promote peace and stability in Europe”.

“The war comes with enormous human and material costs,” the Norwegian prime minister said. “The suffering and destruction will impact generations.”

Stubb said Tuesday’s call was “frank and substantive”, adding that the war’s outcome will “have a direct impact on our and the broader European security”.

Relations between the US, Ukraine and its European allies have been worsening since US President Donald Trump agreed to lift some sanctions from Russia, allowing it to export oil to the US.

Stubb and Støre said they had taken the initiative to continue talks held in the Norwegian capital on 20 October, after which Witkoff travelled on to St Petersburg to meet Putin.

After those talks, Ukraine, Russia and the US agreed to restart three-way negotiations that Russia had halted for months.

After speaking with the two Nordic leaders, Zelensky said part of their discussions with Putin had focused on the upcoming trilateral talks due to be held in Abu Dhabi in November.

Zelensky said he had discussed with them “various formats for our engagement with partners in Europe that could be useful in further supporting diplomacy, our defense, and our shared security”.

Stubb and Støre are the first European leaders to contact Vladimir Putin since French President Emmanuel Macron’s conversation with him in July 2025.

Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she was “very sceptical” of Tuesday’s dialogue between her Nordic neighbours and Moscow.

“It hasn’t been co-ordinated with any of the rest of us,” she told Danish broadcaster DR.

Moscow regularly accuses European leaders of prolonging the war by supplying Ukraine with weapons.

But last weekend, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said having a European negotiator at the peace talks table would be “good”.