Vladimir Putin delivers a speech at the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi, Russia, on Thursday. Photo: EPA-EFE/MAXIM SHIPENKOV
Russia’s de facto leader Vladimir Putin lavished praise on US president-elect Donald Trump during an appearance at an annual discussion forum on Russian foreign policy in Sochi on Thursday.
“I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate him on his election as president of the United States,” Putin told a carefully selected audience at the Valdai Discussion Club. “I have already said that we will work with any head of state to whom the American people have given a mandate, and this will indeed be the case in practice.”
Describing Trump as having been “attacked from all sides” during his first term in office, Putin said that Trump had been left “afraid to take a step to the left, to the right, to say the wrong word”, but stressed his own readiness to speak with him, adding, “Let us resume contact and hold discussions.”
Putin was also careful to heap personal praise on the notoriously egotistical US president-elect. “How he acted during the attempt on his life … made a real impression on me. He’s a courageous man, it turns out,” Putin said, before going on to praise Trump for acting “like a man” after a bullet grazed his ear in an assassination attempt made in Butler, Pennsylvania in July.
Reflecting on what Trump’s extraordinary political comeback meant for US-Russian relations, Putin stressed that while he didn’t know what was going to happen now, “what he said about efforts to restore relations with Russia, to bring an end to the Ukraine crisis, in my opinion are deserving of attention at least.”
