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Zelenskyy said Trump should have been aware of Putin’s true nature before praising him.
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The ex-US president has mixed condemnation of the Ukraine war with continued admiration for Putin.
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Zelenskyy said Trump had been given “plenty of time” to figure Russia’s president out.
Donald Trump has had “plenty of time” to figure out President Vladimir Putin’s true nature, Ukraine’s leader has said in an interview.
President Volodymyr Zelesnkyy told CNN that the former US President has had “enough time, plenty of time, to understand who Putin is.”
Trump expressed admiration for Putin throughout his presidency — and this continued even after Russian tanks rolled onto Ukrainian lands on February 24, although he has also condemned the war.
Hours before the invasion, as Putin’s forces massed along three sides of the Ukrainian border, Trump said admiringly that he’d “taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart,” according to footage taken at Mar-a-Lago and shared on social media.
And even after the reality of the invasion became clear, Trump has combined condemnation of the war with continued praise, as CNN reported.
At a Georgia rally in March, Trump called the invasion a “big mistake,” but noted his admiration of authoritarian leaders like Putin by saying: “The smartest one gets to the top,” as The Guardian reported.
During an interview aired Sunday, Zelenskyy said Trump had reached “such a high position where it’s not even possible not to recognise that he is the opponent, in terms of values, to your own people.
“In this position, you need to understand who Putin is, what he’s driving at, and what steps he will take to get there,” he added.
“But this war has no distances it cannot cover,” he said. “Probably he needed this to promote his domestic policy.”
While Congress has voted multiple times in favor of billion-dollar military packages for Ukraine with bipartisan support, the GOP’s hard right has tended to side with Putin.
As Insider’s Charles Davis reported, for “MAGA” Republicans such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the blame for Putin’s war more comfortably sits with Biden rather than the Russian leader himself — a line that Trump himself has led on.
“I have no doubt that President Putin made his decision … only after watching the pathetic withdrawal from Afghanistan,” he told CPAC in August.
Read the original article on Business Insider
