Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that the war between Russia and Ukraine would never have begun if President Donald Trump were president in 2022 instead of then-President Joe Biden.
Putin’s comments came during his joint press conference with Trump in Alaska following their three-hour-long closed-door meeting with top advisers about the war in Ukraine.
“I’d like to remind you that in 2022, during the last contact with the previous administration, I tried to convince my previous American colleague the situation should not be brought to the point of no return when it would come to hostilities,” Putin, speaking in Russian, said according to a translator. “And I said it quite directly back then that it’s a big mistake.”
“Today, when President Trump saying [sic] that if he was the president back then, there will [sic] be no war, and I’m quite sure that it would indeed be so. I can confirm that,” he said, per the precise audio translation.
Trump has long said that the war would not have happened if he were president at the time. In fact, during a CNN town hall event in May 2023, Trump said as much and that Putin would agree with his statement.
“If I were president, this would have never happened, and even the Democrats admit that. Putin knew it would have never happened, and his pipeline would have never happened,” Trump said. “A lot of things would have never happened.”
“All those dead people, both Russian and Ukrainian… they wouldn’t be dead today, and all those cities that are blown up and disintegrated right to the ground, that wouldn’t have happened,” he said.
Putin contrasted his virtually non-existent relationship with the Biden administration with his “business-like and trustworthy” relationship with Trump and expressed optimism about a potential end to the conflict.
“I think that overall, me and President Trump have built a very good business-like and trustworthy contact, and have every reason to believe that moving down this path, we can come and the sooner the better to the end of the conflict in Ukraine,” he said.
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