Trump to discuss Siberian plague death with Putin as US presses for answers

President Donald Trump said Tuesday he would speak "very soon" with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the reported plague death of a laboratory technician in Siberia, as Washington pressures Moscow for transparency. The US has expressed growing concern over the incident. Secretary of State Marco Rubio urged Russia to share information, and the State Department reportedly sent a confidential diplomatic demarche warning that failing to disclose details violates international health obligations. Russian authorities deny imposing anti-plague measures and say postmortem tests found no disease, attributing the death to pneumonia with an "undetermined" cause. The World Health Organization assessed the risk to Irkutsk as "moderate to low" and said Russia reported no plague cases. Moscow countered Trump's aid offer by highlighting US measles outbreaks and a fatal plague case in New Mexico, while an international conference on plague is scheduled in Irkutsk for October 21-22.