US president said Ukraine war would not have happened if Moscow had not been thrown out in 2014 over Crimea
Donald Trump has displayed his disdain for the collective western values supposedly championed by the G7 group of industrialised countries by again demanding that Russia be readmitted to the group. He also said the war in Ukraine would not have happened if Moscow had been kept in the club.
Trump made his remarks in front of media, alongside Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, who is hosting the G7, at the start of the summit’s first round of talks.
Russia was thrown out of the G8 after it invaded Crimea in 2014, and Trump’s defence of Vladimir Putin came a day before the US president is scheduled to meet his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on the fringes of the summit. It will be the first meeting between the two men since Pope’s Francis’s funeral in April.
Zelenskyy is pressing for a reluctant Trump to respond to Putin’s refusal to agree a 30-day ceasefire by applying sanctions on Russia that the US Senate has already approved.
