Trump blast at Russian backing for ‘evil’ Assad
WAR OF WORDS DONALD AND VLAD AT ODDS US president attacks Putin over defence of Syria leader Spicer ‘sorry’ for Hitler gas comments
DONALD Trump has slammed Vladimir Putin for backing “a truly evil” Bashar al Assad, as he defended his cruise missile strike on a Syrian airbase.
The US president said Putin’s support for the Syrian leader was “very bad for Russia” and “very bad for mankind”, adding that without it “you wouldn’t have a problem right now”.
In a TV interview a week after bombarding a Syrian airbase in retaliation for a sarin gas attack on civilians, Trump labelled Assad “an animal”.
He said graphic images of children dying after a nerve gas attack widely blamed on the Syrian president moved him to launch a missile strike.
Trump told Fox News: “There is going to be a lot of pressure on Russia to make sure that peace happens because, frankly, if Russia hadn’t gone in and backed this animal, you wouldn’t have a problem right now.”
His comments came as Russia accused the US of “primitive and loutish” rhetoric over Syria – minutes before talks began between their top diplomats. Russian president Putin meanwhile said relations with the US have worsened since Trump took office. He told Russian TV that trust between the two countries had deteriorated “on the military level”. The remarks were released as Russia’s foreign minister met his US counterpart in Moscow amid rising tension over the chemical attack in Syria.
US secretary of state Rex Tillerson was holding talks with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.
Ahead of the meeting in Moscow, Lavrov said Russia had “a lot of questions regarding very ambiguous and contradictory ideas coming from Washington”.
Meanwhile, UK Chancellor Philip Hammond defended Boris Johnson after he failed to convince members of the G7 to impose sanctions against Russia over support for Assad’s regime.
Johnson was accused of being a serial bungler by cancelling a scheduled visit to Moscow and then failing in his efforts to have the G7 back the British idea for sanctions against Russia.
Hammond said Johnson had pursued the “right approach” after last week’s chemical weapons attack, reportedly carried out by Assad’s forces, which killed dozens of Syrian civilians. BLUNDERING White House press secretary Sean Spicer said he had “let the president down” when he claimed Adolf Hitler never used chemical weapons against his own people.
Spicer compared the man responsible for murdering millions of Jews in gas chambers favourably to Syria leader Bashar al-Assad, who launched a sarin gas attack against civilians last week.
At a White House briefing on Tuesday, he said: “We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War Two,” adding, “someone as despicable as Hitler didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons”.
The comments were challenged by journalists and led to clumsy attempts at clarification before he apologised for causing any offence.
Yesterday, Spicer said: “I made a mistake. There’s no other way to say it. I got into a topic that I shouldn’t have and I screwed up.
“This was my mistake, my bad, that I needed to fix.”