President Donald Trump is taking a leaf out of Vladimir Putin’s book with his aim of taking over Greenland, says a Kremlin propagandist, who is comparing it to the Crimean land grab
Donald Trump is poised to use Vladimir Putin’s playbook to steal Greenland, a leading Russian propagandist has claimed.
The US president is eyeing the same tactics used to snatch Crimea from Ukraine, says Margarita Simonyan, head of the RT propaganda empire, one of the Kremlin leader’s most loyal cheerleaders. Putin famously deployed “little green men” – troops not wearing regular Russian military fatigues – to snatch the Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.
Then he held a bogus referendum to legitimise his colonial takeover. Now Putin may be trumped by Trump as the US takes Greenland, according to Simonyan, 44. “I want to point out how [the Trump administration] started cosplaying us and making like us,” said Simonyan, one of Putin’s highest paid propagandists.
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“What did JD Vance say this week about Greenland? I mean, it’s mind-boggling. That there will be a referendum in Greenland where [people] will ask for independence… And then there will be another one, which will result in Greenland joining the US by referendum.”
Putin used a similar tactic – in his case a vote-at-gunpoint – to claim his right to annex Crimea. Simonyan smirked: “Does that remind you of anything? It’s just amazing. They don’t even want to think of [themselves] anymore.”
Trump has not ruled out military action to grab Greenland but indicated he hopes it didn’t come to that. There was a “good possibility that we could do it without military force,” said Trump but he refused to rule out a military takeover.
“I don’t take anything off the table,” he said. Putin has already given his blessing to a US takeover of Greenland, apparently seeing it like his land grab in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
“This may surprise some, only at first glance,” he said. “It is a profound mistake to believe that these are some kind of extravagant talks of the new American administration. Nothing of the sort.” Putin was speaking last week at a forum in the Russian Arctic – and even hinted Trump might grab Iceland, too. “In fact, the United States had such plans back in the 1860s,” he said.
“Even then, the American administration was considering the possibility of annexing Greenland and Iceland. But this idea did not receive support from Congress at the time.”
Meanwhile, Trump lashed out at both Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday, expressing frustration with the Russian and Ukrainian leaders as he struggles to forge a truce to end the war.
Although Trump insisted to reporters that “we’re making a lot of progress,” he acknowledged that “there’s tremendous hatred” between the two men, a fresh indication that negotiations may not produce the swift conclusion that he promised during the campaign.
Trump began voicing his criticisms in an early morning interview with NBC News while he was at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida. He said he was “angry, p****d off” that Putin questioned Zelenskyy’s credibility. The Russian leader recently said that Zelensky lacks the legitimacy to sign a peace deal and suggested that Ukraine needed external governance.