Russia’s Chief of General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, had held a phone call with the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown Jr, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has said. General Gerasimov last spoke with his American counterpart in March 2023.
The phone conversation between the countries’ top generals took place on November 27, the ministry said in a statement on Thursday, when Gerasimov warned Brown about missile exercises in the Mediterranean Sea.
“During the conversation, the US side was informed about the exercises in the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea by the Russian Navy and Aerospace Forces groupings, involving live-fire drills and launches of high-precision missiles,” the statement read.
The warning was made by Gerasimov “to prevent possible incidents in connection with the presence of US and NATO ships near the area of the Russian exercise,” it added.
The drills in question took place on Tuesday, when Russian vessels launched new ship-based Tsirkon hypersonic missiles, the Defense Ministry said in a previous statement.
Earlier in the day, Brown’s spokesman, Captain JD Dorsey, confirmed media reports about the two military leaders holding a conversation a week ago.
Gerasimov and Brown “discussed a number of global and regional security issues, including the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” Dorsey told ABC.
“This was the first time the leaders spoke since General Brown became chairman” in October 2023, he noted.
After the escalation of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in February 2022, Gerasimov communicated several times with Brown’s predecessor as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley.
The latest phone call remained undisclosed because “at the request of General Gerasimov, General Brown agreed to not proactively announce the call,” Dorsey said.
The New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing unnamed US military and defense officials, that the two generals had “talked about how to manage escalation concerns between the two countries” during their conversation.
One of the sources claimed that they had discussed Russia’s recent use of a new Oreshnik medium-range hypersonic ballistic missile to strike a Ukrainian military-industrial facility last month.
According to Moscow, the deployment of the state-of-the-art system was a response to Washington and its allies allowing Ukraine to target internationally recognized Russian territory with the long-range weapons they supply to Kiev.
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned at the time that, if the Ukrainian attacks deep inside Russia continue, the authorities in Moscow reserve the right “to use our weapons against military facilities of those countries that allow the use of their weapons against our facilities.”