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Putin says Ukraine war might not have happened if Trump’s 2020 ‘victory’ hadn’t been ‘stolen’

Vladimir Putin at Moscow State University, 24 January 2025. Photo: EPA-EFE / Ramil Sitdikov / Sputnik / Kremlin Pool

Vladimir Putin at Moscow State University, 24 January 2025. Photo: EPA-EFE / Ramil Sitdikov / Sputnik / Kremlin Pool

Vladimir Putin told Russian state TV correspondent Pavel Zarubin on Friday that the war in Ukraine could potentially have been avoided altogether had Donald Trump been president in 2022 instead of Joe Biden.

Commenting in an interview on recent calls for peace talks over ending the war, Putin stressed that Russia had “never refused contact with the US administration” and stressed that it hadn’t been the Kremlin’s “fault that the previous administration refused those contacts.”

Describing his past interactions with US President Donald Trump as “professional, yet pragmatic” and “trusting”, Putin told Zarubin that he couldn’t “help but agree with him that if he had been president, if his victory hadn’t been stolen from him in 2020, then perhaps the crisis that arose in Ukraine in 2022 would never have taken place.”

Trump claimed to have won the 2020 election before the results were announced, and made repeated claims of electoral fraud, which culminated in the storming of the US Capitol Building by diehard Trump supporters attempting to prevent Congress from certifying the election results on 6 January 2021. Trump went on to hire investigators to look into voter fraud, but they were unable to find any evidence of ballot irregularities.

Trump gave the most detailed account to date of his plan to end the war in Ukraine, offering Vladimir Putin a choice between doing things “the easy way or the hard way” in a post he made on his Truth Social microblogging site on Wednesday.

Threatening to impose new sanctions, taxes and tariffs on Russia unless Putin ended the country’s “ridiculous” war in Ukraine, Trump stressed that he “loved the Russian people” and was ready to do Putin a “very big favour” by striking a deal to end the war.

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