Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin received an unusual request from an unlikely caller: His Russian counterpart wanted to talk.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Austin had spoken by phone with Russia’s defense minister only five other times, almost always at the Pentagon’s initiative and often in an effort to avoid miscalculations that could escalate the conflict.
In fact, Austin had reached out to Russia’s new defense minister, Andrei Belousov, just a couple of weeks earlier, on June 25, in an effort to keep the "lines of communication open,” the Pentagon said. It was the first phone call between the two men since Belousov, an economist, replaced Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s long-running defense minister, in a Kremlin shake-up in May.