‘Tough cookie’ Putin’s intervention ‘a genius move’, says Trump

‘He’s got a lot of great charm and a lot of pride. He loves his country’

‘There was no reason for the Ukraine situation to happen’

DONALD TRUMP has declared the invasion of Ukraine would never have happened if he was still president as he called Vladimir Putin a “genius”.

The former US president accused the current one, Joe Biden, of being “weak” in his response to Mr Putin’s sending of forces into separatist enclaves in the east of Ukraine.

Mr Trump said in an interview yesterday that he admired “tough cookie” Mr Putin, describing his latest move as “genius”.

“Putin declares a big portion of Ukraine as independent. That’s wonderful. How smart is that? This is genius,” he told The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show.

“I knew Putin very well. I got along with him great. He’s got a lot of great charm and a lot of pride. He loves his country.”

The 75-year-old said that as president, he would talk to Mr Putin about wanting to invade Ukraine. “I used to talk to him about it. I said, ‘You can’t do it. You’re not gonna do it’. But I could see that he wanted it.”

Earlier, Mr Trump warned that oil and gas prices would rise, to the benefit of the Russian president and said that “he would have never done [this] during the Trump administration, what he is doing now, no way ... now it has begun, oil prices are going higher and higher, and Putin is not only getting what he always wanted, but getting, because of the oil and gas surge, richer and richer”.

He added: “If properly handled, there was absolutely no reason that the situation currently happening in Ukraine should have happened at all. The weak sanctions are insignificant relative to taking over a country and a massive piece of strategically located land.”

Mr Trump’s comments came as the US embassy in Ukraine mocked Mr Putin’s claims that communist Russia created the country.

The embassy posted images on social media depicting civilisation in Kyiv a millennium ago, alongside images of a forest to represent what Moscow would have looked like at the time. Mr Putin claimed that “modern Ukraine was entirely and fully created by Russia” after the 1917 revolution during a fiery speech which he delivered on Monday.

The Russian president blamed the country’s early Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, for “dividing” Russia by “tearing from her pieces of her own historical territory”.

Mr Putin’s revisionist history is part of his effort to bring an independent, Western-tilting Ukraine back under Russia’s orbit.