President Donald Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders on Monday in a follow up to last week’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. While the back-to-back, high-stakes meetings between the warring leaders and their regional partners are aimed at finally bringing in an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine, Trump can’t seem to stop undermining the delicate negotiations by publicly parroting Kremlin talking points.
In a Tuesday morning interview with Fox News, Trump falsely claimed that Putin and Russia had “gotten” Crimea “from Obama,” describing Russia’s annexation of the territory as a “real estate deal.” Crimea, a peninsula in the north of the Black Sea, was invaded and occupied by Russia in 2014.
“The war started over NATO and Crimea and they wanted Crimea back,” Trump said. “That was given — not a shot fired —- by President Obama in perhaps the worst real estate deal I’ve ever seen.”
“Crimea is the apple of Ukraine, it is so beautiful. And Obama gave it away. … He demanded they let it go, Russia took it like candy from a baby. It was really Obama’s, that was pure and simple Obama’s fault, what a terrible thing,” Trump added.
In the same interview, Trump declared that it was “insulting” that Ukraine — which has now been invaded by Russia twice in little more than a decade — had sought to join NATO. “They asked for it and shouldn’t have asked for it. It was insulting,” Trump said. “They could have asked for other things — the other thing they wanted to get Crimea back.”
Trump later insinuated that it was actually Ukraine that had instigated the current war against Russia, telling Fox and Friends that “you don’t take on a nation that is 10 times your size and military experts.” It was, of course, Russia that invaded Ukraine in February 2022, kicking off the war that has now raged for over three years.
Trump rolled out the literal red carpet to receive Putin in Alaska on Friday, even granting the Russian authoritarian a ride in the presidential limousine — an unprecedented honor rarely granted to foreign dignitaries, much less internationally wanted war criminals.
Judging by Trump’s statements following the summit, Putin spent much of their private discussions stroking the president’s ego. On Friday, Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that Putin had reassured him that it was actually widespread mail-in voter fraud that had cost him the 2020 election.
“Vladimir Putin said something — one of the most interesting things — he said, ‘your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting,’” Trump recounted. “He said … ‘it’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.” Days later, Trump announced that he would seek to eliminate mail-in voting at a national level, despite lacking the constitutional authority to make any such change to state voting laws.
According to a Monday report from Axios, Trump was so eager to talk to Putin again that he interrupted his meeting with European leaders to speak to the Russian president. According to subsequent reporting from The New York Times, the call lasted around 40 minutes.
Trump apparently left his European counterparts to talk among themselves for the better part of an hour, telling Fox News that it “would be disrespectful to president Putin,” to make the call in their presence.
“It was 1:00 in the morning in Russia,” Trump said. “But he picked it up very happily.”
