Putin flatters Trump: “Your victory was stolen”

Russia and USA before talks

Putin flatters Trump: “Your victory was stolen”

The Russian President butters up Donald Trump before a joint meeting. This worries Ukraine very much.

After US President Donald Trump took office, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared his willingness to hold talks with the new government in Washington. “We have always said, and I would like to emphasize this again, that we are ready for these negotiations” on Ukraine,” Putin told a reporter on Russian state television on Friday. The government in Kyiv warned against being excluded from negotiations.

Putin also said that Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine might have been prevented if Trump had been US president at the time. “I can only agree with him that the crisis in Ukraine in 2022 might not have happened if he had been president – if his victory in 2020 had not been stolen from him,” the Kremlin leader said. He repeated Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that he won the 2020 US presidential election against Joe Biden.

Putin also described the new US president as “smart” and “pragmatic”. Trump is “not only a smart person, but also a pragmatic person,” Putin said.

John Bolton, the former national security adviser during President Donald Trump’s first term and now a vocal Trump critic, warned during a CNN appearance Friday that the Russian president wants to influence the American leader. “He knows how to play with Trump, and I think that’s very dangerous territory for Ukraine,” Bolten said

Both Putin and Trump have made it clear in the past that they are willing to talk about the war in Ukraine. However, neither Washington nor Moscow provided any information about a specific meeting.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called on Trump on Friday to resume talks on nuclear disarmament. “We are interested in starting this negotiation process as quickly as possible,” he said. Now it’s “the Americans’ turn.”

In February 2023, Russia suspended its participation in the so-called New Start Treaty, the last remaining nuclear disarmament agreement between Moscow and Washington. The treaty limits states to a maximum of 1,550 operational warheads each. Both sides have said they will respect the limits set in the treaty until 2026. However, talks about a successor contract have been on hold for months.

In 2019, Russia and the USA had already withdrawn from the 1987 INF Treaty, which limited the use of nuclear and non-nuclear medium-range missiles.

Trump also said on Tuesday, a day after his swearing in, that he was ready to meet with Putin. A day later, he threatened Moscow with tougher sanctions and tariffs if the war in Ukraine, which has now been going on for almost three years, does not come to an end soon.

On Thursday, the US president called for lower oil prices to end the war. Kremlin boss Putin then said on Friday that he did not believe Trump would drive oil prices down. Oil prices that are too high or too low are bad for both the Russian and US economies. He couldn’t imagine that Trump would harm his own country’s economy.

Trump had announced that he wanted to end the Ukraine war immediately after his return to the White House. There were fears in Ukraine that the country could be forced to make concessions to Russia by withholding US aid.

The government in Kiev warned on Friday that it would be excluded from negotiations. Putin “wants to negotiate the fate of Europe – without Europe,” said the head of the Ukrainian presidential office, Andriy Yermak. “And he wants to talk about Ukraine without Ukraine,” he continued. “That won’t happen.”