Donald Trump has responded to claims he will soon be visiting Vladimir Putin in Moscow following days of deepening ties between the US president and the Kremlin
Donald Trump has been forced to deny claims he will soon join Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
Reports emerged in French media today that Trump was planning to fly to Russia for a ‘Victory Day’ World War II commemoration event on May 9. It would mark the first visit by a US president since Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But in new comments to US television this evening, the president moved to deny the rumours. Asked whether he would be going off to Moscow for the ceremony, he said: “No, I’m not.”
The reports of a Trump visit to Russia followed several days of the 79-year-old appearing to grow closer to Putin. After sending a team to begin bilateral talks with Russia in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, he has repeated the Kremlin’s claim that Ukraine started the current conflict, and labelled Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator without elections”.
The Ukrainian president meanwhile claimed Trump was living in a Russian “disinformation space”, which led White House officials to accuse Zelensky of “insulting” his counterpart. Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who is currently leading the Department of Government Efficiency within the Trump administration, meanwhile suggested Zelensky is running a “fraud machine feeding off the dead bodies of soldiers”.
Trump’s support of Putin appeared to continue on Friday when he refused to answer a question about whether he was responsible for the war in Ukraine. After he described some of the damage caused to Ukraine’s cities, Fox News Radio host Brian Kilmeade asked Trump “that’s Vladimir Putin’s fault, don’t you agree?” But the US president did not address his point and went on to criticise Zelensky’s record, saying he didn’t think it was “important” to have the Ukrainian president at peace talks.
A visit by a sitting US president would have been seen as a major geopolitical coup by Putin, whose nation was effectively shunned by the Western world following the 2022 invasion. Trump previously met Russian President Vladimir Putin at a G8 summit in Helsinki back in July 2018. The last time a US president visited Russia itself was in 2013, when Barack Obama travelled to St Petersburg for the G20 summit, and held a bilateral meeting with Putin.