The Russian leader believes the Ukraine conflict might have been avoided if Donald Trump had become US president in 2020
FILE PHOTO: Pro-Trump supporters storm the US Capitol following a rally with President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. © Samuel Corum / Getty Images
Russian president Vladimir Putin has said the 2020 US presidential election was “stolen” from Donald Trump, and that had the outcome been declared fairly, the Ukraine conflict might have been avoided.
“I cannot disagree with him that if he had been president, if his victory hadn’t been stolen in 2020, perhaps the crisis in Ukraine that arose in 2022 wouldn’t have happened,” Putin has said in an interview published by Russia 1 TV journalist Pavel Zarubin on Telegram on Friday.
In 2023 Trump claimed to American radio host Hugh Hewitt that the Ukraine conflict would never have begun if the 2020 US elections hadn’t been “rigged” and Joe Biden hadn’t replaced him in there Oval Office.
“[Putin] would have never done it if the election weren’t rigged, our election. It was rigged and stolen. If that election wasn’t rigged, if I were president, you would right now have millions of people living that are dead,” according to an interview transcript.
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Trump has never admitted that he lost the 2020 election, despite courts failing to find evidence of widespread voter fraud. He eventually stepped down as president after a crowd of his supporters stormed the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021, interrupting the certification of Biden’s victory.
The Democrats accused Trump of inciting the riot and impeached him in 2021. Trump has denied any wrongdoing, dismissing the accusations as a “witch hunt.”
He has consistently alleged the 2020 election was blighted by irregularities, and that he lost despite winning 10 million more votes than Biden.
Hours after he was sworn in for his second term Trump pardoned around 1,500 people involved in the storming of the Capitol building. He described the defendants as patriots and hostages, insisting that their prosecution was politically motivated.
In June 2021, Putin criticized the US government’s response to the Capitol riot, accusing it of double standards. He argued that while Washington condemns crackdowns on anti-government protests abroad, it prosecutes its own citizens who express political dissent. “They weren’t just a crowd of robbers and rioters. Those people had come with political demands,” Putin stated.